Carbon Responsive Ecosystems

Project Information

CORE12.01

Grant agreement ID: 101213513

DOI

10.3030/101213513

EC signature date 15 May 2025

Start date 1 June 2025

End date 31 May 2027

Funded under

• European innovation ecosystems

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 499 376,19

Coordinated by

ANTHOLOGY VENTURES JSC
Bulgaria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CORE12.01 (Carbon Responsive Ecosystems)

Reporting period: 2025-06-01 to 2026-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Europe's zero-carbon transition depends on climate technologies that are still, for the most part, inside universities and research and technology organisations, and researchers are often siloed in theoretical contexts and underestimate what bringing a product to market requires. Moving out is hard: climate-tech has a longer time-to-market than most sectors and needs substantial capital before a first sale is made. Access to support and early capital is especially challenging for spin-offs from higher education institutions in moderate and emerging innovation ecosystems.
CORE12.01 (Carbon Responsive Ecosystems) is a 24-month Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action running June 2025 to May 2027, delivered by four partners spanning Europe's innovation gradient: Anthology Ventures (Bulgaria, emerging innovator), CERTH (Greece, moderate innovator), THINGS (Sweden, leading innovator) and the Social Innovation Exchange (UK), the consortium's social sciences and humanities anchor.
The main objective is to support researchers' entrepreneurial evolution and demystify research exploitation by increasing their access to stakeholders and industry. Four Key Objectives structure the work: strengthening ecosystem connections through social innovation tools; equipping ecosystem actors with commercialisation and market-fit skills; translating solutions into impact through collaborative validation and community engagement; and exchanging best practice between ecosystems while liaising with other EU initiatives.
Thirty European deep-tech researchers are recruited through a competitive open call as Innovation Fellows and put through a 25-hour, five-module fellowship combining training, coaching, mentoring and a KPI-driven Masterplan process; sixty ecosystem actors are engaged in parallel. Two instruments underpin the work: the Responsive Ecosystem Toolbox (RET), a curated set of social innovation and systems-thinking methods, and the Responsive Innovation Monitoring tool (RIM), a KPI-driven platform for readiness assessment and progress monitoring. A quadruple-helix model connects academia, industry, government and civil society, with commitments to at least 25% female participation and 35% representation from emerging and moderate innovator countries. Expected results include a 30-50% increase in Fellows' entrepreneurial competence, a 40% rise in their success engaging investors, roughly EUR 7M of funding facilitated and 90 documented networking connections. Social sciences and humanities are integral rather than additive: SIX leads a transversal SSH process ensuring deep-tech applications are shaped by, and adopted within, the communities they serve.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first year completed the ecosystem development and tool implementation phase and launched the fellowship phase on schedule.
Ecosystem research and the Toolbox. Desk research was combined with interviews of ecosystem actors and founders across seven strong, moderate and emerging innovator regions, from Cambridge and London to Thessaloniki and the Basque Country. These surfaced consistent gaps in ecosystem-level sense-making, long-term visioning and values alignment. Four tools were then adapted from existing toolkits on systems change, co-creation and responsible innovation and released to Fellows as version 1.0 embedded in the first training module.
The monitoring tool. The Responsive Innovation Monitor (RIM) went live in April 2026 with a seven-domain readiness audit spanning technology, market, business, intellectual property, regulatory, team and societal/environmental dimensions, plus AI-assisted goal and KPI generation, a Masterplan commercialisation report and advisor collaboration. It has since run on real workspace data, with three feature additions and two reliability issues resolved rapidly. The search layer uses an EU-based provider with zero data retention; researchers retain full ownership and all AI output is editable and jointly reviewed.
Open call and selection. The Open Call ran 28 November 2025 to 10 March 2026, extended five weeks to absorb the holiday period. It attracted 168 applications and 67 submissions, 65 of them eligible, exceeding the target of 60. Each application was assessed by three evaluators drawn from all partners, and the ranked list was approved by the Advisory Board. Thirty-seven applicants were invited and 33 Innovation Fellows onboarded, above the target of 30, with female participation at 57.6% against a 25% commitment. Their innovations span agriculture, circularity, cyber-security, data, energy, finance, forestry and health.
Fellowship delivery. The programme formally began in month 11. All Fellows were onboarded to RIM, introduced to the Masterplan components, and are progressing against their KPIs. The five-module Research Valorisation Training Programme began on 9 June 2026 and runs to approximately end November 2026: Training Modules 1 and 2, and fifty-three of 90 planned coaching hours have been delivered by the end of June.
Monitoring, governance and outreach. A validated KPI framework was built from literature review and extraction of proposal indicators, documented in KPI cards and operationalised as a KPI Tracker acting as the project's single source of performance data. An IPR Board was established and met on 18 May 2026. Communication concentrated on the open call, delivering 4,470 unique website visitors and a LinkedIn engagement rate of 9.68% against a target above 5%. The team joined four ecosystem events and engaged other EU initiatives.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

CORE12.01's contribution is a new configuration of instruments rather than a new technology. The RIM tool places societal, environmental, regulatory and policy readiness alongside the conventional technology, market and business dimensions, where most frameworks used with research spin-offs stop at technology readiness. It converts audit results into measurable goals and KPIs, and holds them in a shared advisor-researcher workspace with continuous progress-tracking for commercialisation. This provides evidence that a researcher, advisor, TTO or funder can all read the same way. The Responsive Ecosystem Toolbox adapts systems-thinking, co-creation and responsible-innovation methods, traditionally the province of social and public sector innovation practice, for climate-tech researchers and their TTOs, addressing gaps where conventional commercialisation training is thinnest. The Fellowship Programme combines both into a replicable, KPI-driven process co-designed across the innovation gradient, with uptake potential among TTOs, accelerators, incubators, RTOs and HEIs.
Five needs will determine uptake of these tools: evidence, since the competence, investor-engagement and funding measurements fall in the second year; IPR and licensing clarity; access to markets and finance for the Fellows; sustainability beyond the grant, requiring a business model and platform maintenance; and internationalisation, connecting to EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities, the EIC community and technology transfer networks.