In the six years of its implementation, Career-FIT has achieved all the expected results, despite the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 epidemic that were overcome by prompt and effective solutions.
Enteprise Ireland, its sole beneficiary, has successfully managed the programme, its two calls for proposals and evaluations, contractual and financial issues, monitored the implementation of the fellowships, liaised with the Advisory Board and REA, etc.
The recruitment target of 50 Career-FIT Fellows was achieved. Their profile is balanced: 40% of them are female and 60% are male researchers, and they belong to 30 different nationalities and diverse scientific areas (ranging from functional food and ingredients to photonics and from drug formulation to artificial intelligence).
Each Fellow chose and designed their Career-FIT research project freely and could rely on the support of a dedicated Academic Mentor and Company Mentor throughout its implementation.
Because of its bottom-up approach, the programme included both standardised and tailor-made training opportunities. While Fellows were free to lay out their yearly training needs (a combination of technical skills and transversal ones), they also benefited from: a Centralised Training Event organised by Enterprise Ireland on a yearly basis; coaching by the dedicated Mentors; industry secondment; Host Organisations' training events for PostDocs (e.g. research project management, Intellectual Property, leadership etc) and support provided by the Technology Transfer Offices in each institution, with expertise in identifying and licensing new technologies and IP.
On the communications, dissemination and exploitation front, the Fellows were very active. They engaged in hundreds of communication activities both in Ireland and internationally, whereby both the specific projects and the Fellows' research profiles were widely publicized. They also published extensively (over 70 publications) and on high-level journals. Exploitation of results was also considerable. The most obvious case is the Fellow who is commercialising his Career-FIT project results having successfully acquired two rounds of research commercialisation funding and now in the process of spinning-out his own company that will manufacture microneedle patches for drug delivery (
https://horizoneurope.ie/horizon-europe/career-fit-programme-helps-bring-revolutionary-medtech-to-market(opens in new window)). Five other Fellows have embarked on a similar journey in Ireland and seven additional ones have exploited the industry exposure they had gained through Career-FIT to be employed by the private sector (in Ireland and internationally). Also, at least five Invention Disclosure Forms (IDFs) and four patents resulting from Career-FIT projects were published.
