More on the European Innovation Council (EIC)

The goal of the European Innovation Council (EIC) initiative is to put Europe at the forefront of the next wave of breakthrough and disruptive innovation that creates new markets in particular through combinations of the physical and the digital, of products and services, of technologies and business models. This will require identifying and supporting high-risk innovators and innovations, where private investors are unable or unwilling to go alone, with the aim of crowding-in private investments and making Europe an internationally attractive location to develop, invest and scale up highly innovative technologies and companies.

On 7 June 2018 the Commission adopted its proposal for Horizon Europe – the next EU framework programme for research and innovation (2021 - 2027) – which includes the legal establishment of the EIC with a budget of €10 billion and the constitution of an EIC Advisory Board, bringing together leading innovators in order to maximise the visibility and impact of the EIC.

European heads of state have explicitly endorsed the creation of a EIC in the next EU budget, and invited the Commission to launch a new pilot initiative on breakthrough innovation within the remaining period of the current programme, Horizon 2020. In response, the Commission is preparing to launch the new pilot initiative worth over €2 billion in 2019-20, building on a first set of pilot activities which were introduced in 2018 (see here) and the recommendations of the High Level Group of innovators (see here).

The new EIC pilot initiative will feature reformed and simplified funding instruments, designed to support disruptive and breakthrough innovations at early-stage (advanced research on future and emerging technologies) and to accelerate the development and scale-up of Europe’s most innovative start-ups and SMEs (including novel financing to blend grant and equity investments).  

This pilot will test out pro-active approaches to managing the financial support, and for this purpose the Commission intends to recruit a number of “programme managers” with expertise in the field of technology/innovation.  

For the purpose of the pilot on blended finance, the Commission intends to establish a special purpose vehicle to manage the equity component and structured in such a way that it can attract other public or private investors in order to increase the leverage effect of the Union contribution.

In order to support the various pilot activities and to prepare the future EIC, the Commission intends to establish an ‘EIC Pilot Advisory Board’. This Board will act as a transition structure until 2021 when the formal EIC Board is expected to be appointed under the Horizon Europe legislation.