Policy Overview: EU Innovation Council Work Programme 2025

I have been in conversation with a research association in Brussels recently and had a good look at current European innovation policy, more specifically the European Innovation Council (EIC) Work Programme for 2025. So I thought of sharing my notes in today’s post, focused on mapping funding opportunities for research in the field of information and communication technologies.

To begin, I think that an overview of EU innovation policy for the coming years starts with Regulation (EU) 2024/795. This regulation establishes the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP), aiming to support EU industry and promote investments in critical and strategic technologies. STEP has three target areas: i) digital technologies and deep tech; ii) clean and resource efficient tech; and biotechnologies. Here is a description quoted from the EU Draft Budget 2025, pp. 7:

“To support the Union’s long-term competitiveness in critical technologies, STEP is set to channel investments into critical projects in digital deep tech, biotech and clean tech, drive innovation and contributing to addressing skills shortages in STEP sectors. In particular, STEP reorients 11 EU programmes towards STEP sectors and objectives, establishes a STEP Seal to award relevant projects and showcases them on a STEP online portal”.

Scheme of the 11 STEP programmes:

In terms of research funding, I mapped the following three promising initiatives worth looking into: i) Q4 2024 Horizon Europe (EIC, details below); ii) Nov 2024 Innovation Fund; and iii) Jan 2025 European Defense Fund. The dates above relate to when details were/will be published. There are many other initiatives, such as those under the EU Chips Act (Regulation EU 2023/1781), for example, but this post focuses on specific opportunities within the EIC for 2025.

EIC Work Programme 2025

The EIC hosted an Info Day in Nov 2024, laying out the details of its funding scheme for 2025. Recording and slide presentations available here. The programme is organized in three different schemes:

• EIC Pathfinder: for advanced research on breakthrough or game-changing technologies
• EIC Transition: for transforming research results into innovation opportunities

• EIC Accelerator: for individual companies to develop and scale up breakthrough innovations with high risk and high impact.

EIC Pathfinder is the scheme that will support research with low Technology Readiness Level (TRL, 1-4 in this case). Low TRL was the focus of this mapping because the research organization I was meeting with works on foundational research. EIC Pathfinder is then divided into two fronts:

The EIC Pathfinder Open will fund research proposals in any scientific field, based on the following criteria:

• Convincing long-term vision of a radically new technology that has the potential to have a transformative positive effect to the EU economy and society
• Concrete, novel and ambitious science-towards-technology breakthrough, providing advancements towards the envisioned technology
• High-risk and high-gain research approach and methodology, with concrete and plausible objectives.

The EIC Pathfinder Challenges will fund research in predefined areas (ICT focus):

• Generative-AI based agents to revolutionize medical diagnosis and treatment of cancer
• Towards autonomous robot collectives delivering collaborative tasks in dynamic unstructured construction environments.
• A third area seeks materials research, which can be linked to ICT in the following (materials 2): understanding underlying mechanisms by means of computational material science and AI.

Here is a summary table for Pathfinder calls for 2025:

This is it for now, but I should be posting more on EU innovation in the coming weeks.

Sources:

Annual EU Budget 2025. Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/eu-budget/annual-eu-budget/all-annual-budgets/2025_en. Accessed: 03 December 2024.

EIC 2025 Work Programme. Available at: https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-2025-work-programme_en. Accessed: 03 December 2024.

European Chips Act. Available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/european-chips-act. Accessed: 03 December 2024.