GSO4SCHOOL Summer School 2020
The European Commission presented details of a new €100 million “Fast Track to Innovation” (FTI) pilot action and five innovation prizes under Horizon 2020. The FTI is 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.
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”),
Environment (“Reduction of Air Pollution Prize”) and
– ICT (“Collaborative Sharing of Spectrum”, “Optical Transmission Prize”).
More than 17,000 proposals
By end-June more than 17,000 proposals have already been submitted for the first Horizon 2020 calls, seeking nine times the available funding. According to the Commission, this marks a substantial increase from 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.
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