A recent study indicates that women raise funding receive significantly less—a disparity that averages more than $1 million—than men. Corporates are different players compared to Venture Capital firms. Even their investment arms, CVCs do have a different approach to the investment policies. Specifically targeting women-led companies to collaborate with corporates under a “paid-pilot” scheme that can really take women-led startups and corporate collaboration to the next level. Open Horizons proposes a novel approach towards covering the women-led companies funding and corporate network gap, by creating a full programme, from scratch, that relies in the work done by other initiatives (Women TechEU or Empowomen) The consortium aims to invest 1.2M€ in startups and is comprised by an experienced consortium of partners as PEDAL (Reputed consultancy in EU projects also specialised in public procurement), SPLORO (experts on cascade funding) and INNOVX (EIC Partner and leading Accelerator). Corporates are also linked to the proposal as partners like Migros (retail) or associated partners like Siemens Industry Software, Repsol (energy) and Stahl (Manufacturing) and planning to expand up to 10. The project’s structured approach includes identifying and formulating corporate challenges, inclusive talent scouting across Europe, and facilitating the funding and implementation of pilot projects within real-world corporate settings. Post-pilot, the programme focuses on expanding growth opportunities for startups by connecting them with investment channels and helping negotiate commercial agreements for long-term collaborations. This comprehensive strategy not only provides a platform for women-led startups to showcase their innovations within major corporations but also integrates them into a broader corporate and innovation ecosystem, ensuring sustained growth and significant market presence.

BOOST Project aims to ease the access of EIC Awardees (mainly EIC Pathfinder and EIC Transition projects as well as related third parties) to the EIC Booster Grants. BOOST Project will distribute EIC Booster Grants (lump-sum grants to finance innovation and portfolio activities) to at least 100 invited EIC Awardees. The Booster grant projects will receive up to €50,000 following a first-come, first-served schema. BOOST Project will also provide the EIC and EISMEA with data relevant to assessing the impact of such support. BOOST Project will do this by guaranteeing efficient and EC-rules compliant governance, adequate integration of EIC Booster grants within the EIC community support and EIC/EISMEA portfolio management activities, and gathering operative and impact data that will support evidence-based decision-making by the EIC and EISMEA. To ensure effective task execution and maximize available resources, BOOST Project utilizes a compact and agile consortium. This allows up to 83% of the total budget to be allocated to EIC awardees. The consortium includes SPL, entity specialised in cascade funding, as Call for proposals manager, MWCB, especialised in tech transfer, as Booster grant projects manager, EurA PT as monitoring and impact manager, all of them coordinated by FBA as Project Coordinator and FSTP Manager. This streamlined consortium will rely on a high-quality, curated database of over 820 experts (who regularly collaborate with the partners) to support the evaluation and assessment of Booster grant projects. All this ensuring a seamless connection with EIC procedures and practices, as all partners are actively involved in EIC projects.

The EU, the US and Canada share the values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and economic and political freedom, and have overlapping foreign policy and security concerns. Close cooperation and strategic relations with the US and Canada remain a priority for the EU. The Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative supports this vision of building bridges internationally, especially with the US and Canada. In fact, there have been many initiatives since 2016 focused on enhancing collaboration and cooperation in the development of NGI technologies, services, and standards with the US and/or Canada. The advancement of emerging topics for the EU NGI and corresponding US and Canadian programmes such trust and data sovereignty, digital identity, internet architecture renovation, decentralised technologies and standards, it is of outmost importance to shape the future Internet. In this context, NGI Sargasso’s mission is to catalyse transatlantic collaboration on the development and experimentation of new ideas, implementation of prototypes, and contribution to standards and open-source communities on technology trends with the potential to reshape tomorrow’s NGI technologies and services. The project will run five open calls for proposals, attracting +300 EU + US and/or Canada teams working on emerging topics for the Next Generation Internet, and will support up to 96 projects that will be benefited from both equity-free funding and capacity building services in a 9-month programme. The consortium is led by the European Science Foundation (an EU association with a network of over 40,000 experts across all scientific disciplines and over 83 countries), and counts with the support of MWCB (an ecosystem builder driving the digital advancement of society), SPLORO (whose team has been part of different NGI projects, including the EU-US fellowship programme NGI Explorers), and AUSTRALO (leader of the community building in NGI Explorers and Think NEXUS), as core partners.

Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in our economies and societies. New businesses help bring innovations to the market, create the bulk of new net jobs and are an engine of productivity growth. Unfortunately, women remain substantially under-represented as entrepreneurs and are a rarity in Europe. While they represent more than half the population, women account for less than a third of entrepreneurs. Such under-representation of women is not only a matter of inequality. In the deep tech area, which represents more than a quarter of Europe’s start-up ecosystem and is now valued at €700b, women obtain only 10% of patent applications in the EU, and less than 15% of start-ups are founded or co-founded by women. Despite the efforts by the EC, widening area startups are still underrepresented in initiatives like Women TechEU. EmpoWOMEN TechEU was born to overcome the obstacles of digital and deep tech innovations led by women and improve equality in the entrepreneurship deep tech domain. EmpoWOMEN TechEU will offer a unique programme for scaling up women-led companies from the Widening Area. The main objective of the project will be to create an exclusive support programme for female founders and entrepreneurs leading deep tech startups from widening-area countries to grow into tomorrow’s female tech leaders and put women at the forefront of deep tech in Europe. We will run a programme in two open calls that will provide a unique acceleration programme, free-equity funding, prizes and vouchers for services for 25 selected women-led companies operating in the deep tech sector. Sploro, Tech Ukraine, Business Angels Europe and Startup Wise Guys, all together with 8 startup associations from the widening area will run this innovative programme which will be the first to support deep tech women-led companies including an acceleration service by SWG, events attendance & investment readiness with direct training from Business Angels and connections with actual VCs.

Charting a course for a more resilient and patient-centric healthcare future depends on continuous development and delivery of innovation to the market. EVOLVE2CARE focuses on HealthTech experimentation practice frameworks, standardizing and enhancing the symbiotic relationship between living labs and innovators in the context of the Transitional Care sector. Challenges ranging from an aging population to complexity of medical conditions and regulatory frameworks, bring a growing recognition of the importance of experimentation practices. By subjecting innovations to real-world scenarios, experimentation uncovers complexities, ethical considerations, interoperability challenges, and unforeseen barriers that controlled environments may not reveal. By harnessing the power of Living Labs – real-world environments involving users and stakeholders – EVOLVE2CARE will provide innovators with access to services for testing/validating research and products. EVOLVE2CARE focuses on three Use Cases (Hospital Discharge Management, Homecare Monitoring Solutions, Aging Population & Care Transitions), engaging stakeholders from across the value chain to examine complexities, barriers and enablers that regulatory frameworks pose to the development and commercialization of healthcare innovations. Recognizing the cross-disciplinary nature of healthcare, we will engage with EIT KICs and their beneficiaries. We will provide a scalable, collaborative experimentation space (the AccelUP marketplace), to aggregate Living Labs, innovators, researchers, regulators, investors, and other pertinent stakeholders. Trainings workshops, and reports will increase knowledge and disseminate findings to our stakeholders. The project partners encompass vast expertise and networks covering the development/commercialization of innovation in transitional care. The project advisory board consists of C-Level Experts in Healthcare/Pharma, Living Labs, Startups, EIT programs and Regulatory issues.