Com­mis­sion announces €100 mil­lion Fast Track to Innov­a­tion and five innov­a­tion prizes

The FTI aims to sup­port Europe’s eco­nomy by offer­ing innov­at­ive busi­nesses and organ­isa­tions grants to give a final push to get great ideas to mar­ket. The prizes offer a reward for tech­no­lo­gic­al break­throughs of high soci­et­al rel­ev­ance. The ini­ti­at­ives under­score the drive to sup­port innov­a­tion in Europe as part of the first, two-year Hori­zon 2020 work pro­gramme. This announce­ment also con­firms the €7 bil­lion for Hori­zon 2020 calls dur­ing 2015 and sets out the timetable for applic­a­tions (MEMO/14/492). European Research, Innov­a­tion and Sci­ence Com­mis­sion­er Máire Geoghegan-Quinn said: ​“The response to the first Hori­zon 2020 calls has been enorm­ous, with more than 17,000 pro­pos­als already sub­mit­ted. I am impressed by the clear rise in industry interest, par­tic­u­larly from small busi­nesses. Now we are fir­ing the start­ing gun on the 2015 calls and I am con­fid­ent they will meet equally strong demand. The Fast Track to Innov­a­tion and the new prizes will provide even more oppor­tun­it­ies for innov­at­ors across Europe to get involved. With these meas­ures we are con­trib­ut­ing to increase Europe’s com­pet­it­ive­ness and cre­ate growth and jobs.” The Fast Track to Innov­a­tion scheme will be open to applic­a­tions from Janu­ary 2015. It will sup­port small con­sor­tia of three to five organ­isa­tions with strong busi­ness par­ti­cip­a­tion to give prom­ising ideas the last push before enter­ing the mar­ket. It is open to ideas in any area of tech­no­logy or applic­a­tion and to any leg­al entity estab­lished in the EU or in a coun­try asso­ci­ated to Hori­zon 2020. The con­tests for the five innov­a­tion prizes will start in late 2014 and early 2015. The prizes, worth €6 mil­lion in 2015, cov­er three dif­fer­ent them­at­ic areas of research: health (“Reduc­tion of the Use of Anti­bi­ot­ics Prize”, ​“Food-Scan­ner Prize”), the envir­on­ment (“Reduc­tion of Air Pol­lu­tion Prize”) and ICT (“Col­lab­or­at­ive Shar­ing of Spec­trum”, ​“Optic­al Trans­mis­sion Prize”). The updated Work Pro­gramme adop­ted this week con­firms details of the calls for pro­pos­als for 2015 first announced last Decem­ber and spe­cifies the dead­lines for pro­pos­als (see IP/13/1232). All fund­ing oppor­tun­it­ies under Hori­zon 2020 are access­ible from the Par­ti­cipant portal.

Response to the first Hori­zon 2020 calls

The response to the first Hori­zon 2020 calls announced in Decem­ber has been enorm­ous, with over 17,000 pro­pos­als sub­mit­ted by end-June, seek­ing nine times the avail­able fund­ing. This marks a sub­stan­tial increase from the pre­vi­ous 7^th Frame­work Pro­gramme (FP7) and a high­er level of com­pet­i­tion. There has been a not­able increase in applic­a­tions from industry, with busi­ness applic­a­tions to the ​“indus­tri­al lead­er­ship” and ​“soci­et­al chal­lenges” pil­lars of Hori­zon rep­res­ent­ing 44 per­cent of the total com­pared with 30 per­cent under com­par­able areas of FP7. SME par­ti­cip­a­tion is par­tic­u­larly strong, with over 5,500 SME applic­a­tions to the Hori­zon calls on encour­aging lead­er­ship in enabling and indus­tri­al tech­no­lo­gies and nearly 2,700 applic­a­tions for fund­ing under the new €3 bil­lion SME Instru­ment. Source: European Commission