The report "Europe is back: Accelerating Breakthrough Innovation" states that very few global players have emerged from Europe in the past few decades. Start-ups relocate to the USA, where the access to venture capital is five times greater. The report highlights key recommendations for improving Europe’s competitivity in the start-up market. To respond to the need for a greater synergy between European organizations to support the European innovation ecosystem in a more efficient way, EIT Climate-KIC implemented the project Rapid Acceleration of Climate Entrepreneurs (RACE) funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the Horizon Europe programme:
• The simplified access to funding and the development of blended funding mechanisms The simplification of processes was tested in our Fast Track implementation to facilitate the access of EIT Climate-KIC entrepreneurs to the EIC Fund.
• Improve the awareness, by setting up monitoring and information systems, create intelligence and communicate success stories We applied our Climate Impact Framework to a selected portfolio of EIC Accelerator startups and provided insights into the avoided emissions potential in connection to the European Green Deal objectives. We also supported early-stage innovations to promote the market uptake of innovations stemming from EU-supported research projects.
• Scale: build the camp, and leverage European ecosystems, by providing access to high quality partnerships and networks, access to risk finance, share practice with other innovation agencies and overcome regulatory barriers The overall proposal’s goal was the first step towards leveraging the ecosystems and assets of EIC and EIT Climate-KIC. This pilot developed and tested coordination mechanisms between both organisations and their innovation communities, looking specifically at synergies and complementarity towards the European Green Deal goals.
Why is it important for society?
Europe set an exciting ambition to be the world’s first climate-neutral continent and pledged EU members to cut emissions by 55% by 2030. The European Green Deal (EGD) was developed to create new opportunities for innovation and investment, reduce emissions, create jobs and growth, address energy poverty, reduce external energy dependency and improve health and wellbeing.
Forecasting climate mitigation potential is an important ability in this context. We need a reliable measure of the climate impact potential of start-ups to help direct EU funding.
Through the efforts in the Market uptake of research innovation projects and Fast Track of EIT Climate-KIC start-ups to EIC Accelerator fund, we also supported the European innovation ecosystem to get closer to its ambitious goals. Synergies between European organizations create more efficient mechanisms and better use of resources to achieve a thriving, climate-positive innovation ecosystem.
What are the overall objectives?
The overall objective of this project was to develop and test coordination mechanisms between the EIC and EIT Climate-KIC and their innovation communities, looking specifically at synergies between the two to be further deployed under Horizon Europe.
Specific objectives:
- SO1: Support EIC to align its portfolio of innovations with the EDG by implementing the climate impact methodology of EIT Climate-KIC.
- SO2: Support an initial cohort of early-stage climate innovators funded by EIC and test how different programmes and networks developed by EIT Climate-KIC can be used to accelerate market uptake of the innovations.
- SO3: Support an initial cohort of start-ups funded by EIT Climate-KIC to connect to the EIC Accelerator Fund to scale their solutions.
