About the European Innovation Council (EIC)

In January 2021, the European Commission signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the European Innovation Council (EIC) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) to reinforce their cooperation to support the best European entrepreneurs. This will enable innovators, innovative SMEs and start-ups, higher education institutions and research organisations to receive quality support services to deploy and scale up innovations faster and with greater impact.

Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and the European Innovation Council (EIC) 

Check the EIT Catalogue to discover the programmes

EIC experts, jury members, coaches and ambassadors

The EIC draws on a wide range of external advice and expertise in order to select the most promising projects and companies and to support them:

• EIC expert evaluators assess applications for funding against the criteria for excellence, impact and implementation.
• EIC jury members conduct face to face interviews with shortlisted companies and projects applying for funding
• EIC coaches provide advice to companies and projects both at the application stage and for maximising the impacts of EIC funding
• EIC ambassadors  act as a voice for the EIC in the Member States, and provide feedback on the programme from all corners of the innovation ecosystem.

Apply to be an EIC expert evaluator, jury member or coach

Impact and results

The fully-fledged European Innovation Council (EIC) has been launched in March 2021. Its unique approach to identifying, developing and scaling up Europe’s breakthrough technologies and game-changing innovation is already delivering tangible results.

In November 2021, the EIC published the EIC Impact Report 2021 that  documents the results and impact of the EIC pilot phase up to 2020. 

EIC pilot phase (2018-2020)

The EIC pilot phase was launched in 2018, incorporating existing instruments under the Horizon 2020 programme, in particular the SME instrument and Future & Emerging Technology (FET) programme. These funding schemes were brought together in single work programme to provide direct support to innovators throughout Europe.

The EIC pilot phase, together with the existing instruments, supported:

• Over 430 projects on Future and Emerging Technologies, involving over 2700 partners. These projects have generated over 3000 peer reviewed scientific articles, over 600 innovations, and over 100 patents.
• Over 5700 startups and SMEs, who have raised over €5 billion in follow up investments (3 euro for every euro from the EU budget) and on average, more than doubled the number of employees in a 2 year period

EIC Forum

The EIC Forum has been established under Pillar III of Horizon Europe to promote coordination and dialogue on the development of the Union's innovation ecosystem’ and is an essential tool to help shaping a new European Innovation Strategy with Member States and Associated Countries. The EIC Forum was formally launched on 23 November 2021. Its activities aims to improve coordination between national and regional innovation programmes and innovation activities under Horizon Europe. It will stimulate synergies and avoid overlaps, by sharing data on programmes and their implementation, resources and expertise, analysis, monitoring of technological, and innovation trends, while interconnecting respective innovators' communities. The EIC Forum, as a place to collect, discuss and test new ideas and proposals from stakeholders and their possible uptake and scaling up at the European level, will be an important channel to discuss policy and also support the programming of Horizon Europe.

Source: European Commission, 2023