Striking a balance between bold action on climate and achieving economic competitiveness has long been one of the key political priorities of the European Union. Against this background, in 2025, with the financial support of EIT, Climate KIC will aim to foster sustainable economic growth and competitiveness whilst delivering on its Strategic Agenda climate ambitions. We will use two critical enablers of change: 1. Fostering and reinforcing the systems innovation and entrepreneurial capacity across the Union, through entrepreneurial education, training and coaching aligned with the EIT Label Framework. We focus our activities on industry, land users, SMEs, business alliances, innovation clusters, Entrepreneurship Support Organisations (ESOs), cities and regional institutions, policymakers, and other related organisations who can help drive positive systemic transformation in innovation ecosystems across Europe. 2. Leveraging pan-European investments in place-based and cross-sectoral innovation to tackle the regional innovation divide. Specifically, we will address cross-sectoral innovation challenges of EU significance to support European competitiveness, re-industrialisation, policy implementation, innovation valleys and transition of technology to its implementation on the market – through activating community connections (Climate KIC partners and innovation ecosystem stakeholders, EIT Community), education and training and actively building synergies between our pan-European (the EU Missions on Adaptation to Climate Change, on 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030, and on A Soil Deal for Europe) and place-based activities (Deep Demonstrations). To help tackle the regional innovation divide special focus is placed on EIT RIS countries and regions identified for enhanced levels of support, esp. countries and regions identified as having the lowest levels of innovation capacity within the European Innovation Scoreboard and / or the European Regional Innovation Scoreboard, as well as rural regions in all EIT RIS eligible countries. The expected results of the 2025 activities are: • Active engagement and uptake of the education and training activities by 50 business / industry enablers across Europe, such as European, national or regional trade associations, alliances, clusters, industrial or innovation partnerships, research centres, to enhance the climate-related components of their value chains and to capture the opportunities of emerging markets. • At least 25 business and Institutional representatives from 3 (mainly eastern and southern) EU regions engaged on industry-Government dialogues for smoother implementation of legislation and learning to work together and systematically explore and generate new ideas on how to apply innovative public-private partnerships. • At least 25 industry representatives (medium and high-level representatives from companies, Industry associations, Clusters, Regional Entrepreneurship and Innovation Agencies, together with research centres, hence contributing to Knowledge Triangle Integration) engaged in 3 regional training sessions (in RIS regions) on how to develop clean industry scenarios for cross-sector value chains, thinking beyond boundaries and imagining the transition to meet their competitiveness and climate ambitions, exploring possible scenarios of transformation pathways and sharing exemplary solutions. • Active engagement and uptake of the education and training activities from 25-35 European communities – scalable in future – to ensure informed and capable actors have implementation strategies to overcome barriers to climate action, including scaling and replicating solutions, creating enabling regulatory frameworks, and financing solutions. • Active engagement and uptake of entrepreneurial training and coaching activities from a diverse cohort of 10 to 15 European entrepreneurship support organisations (ESOs), at least 50% being women-led, to ensur

Addressing major societal challenges like climate change requires a very different approach to deploying innovation. EIT Climate-KIC has developed a practical model of place-based innovation to map, co-develop and match scalable solutions to the challenge of meeting city, region, and industry climate targets. By orchestrating key stakeholders to develop new markets related to climate challenges and by enabling a large-scale learning by doing framework, the model mobilises public and private funding to test and produce actionable intelligence, shared learning and solutions from a portfolio of innovations. There is a considerable need for such operational models for implementing transformative climate policy ambitions within Europe and beyond. EIT and EIT Climate-KIC have identified three core capabilities to enable scale up of this systems innovation model commercially and so help European stakeholders meet ambitious climate goals, aiming to contribute to the avoidance of over 500million tonnes CO2e and strengthening the climate resilience of 10 million people by 2027. This proposal addresses these core capabilities, comprising investment over 2 years of: 4.7M to secure new funding and commercial sales of the Systems Innovation as a Service model; 5.8M to strengthen EIT Climate-KICs core operational capabilities and refine the systems innovation business model; and 6.3M to improve the quality and scalability of the systems innovation model to new national, city and regional governments, as well as industry sectors. The primary objective of this plan - against which success will be measured - is to ensure that by the end of 2024, EIT Climate-KIC is financially sustainable and independent of EIT funding and able to scale its systems innovation model.

Hubs for Circularity (H4C) are to be the European lighthouses of resource efficiency: through implementing best practice in industrial and urban symbiosis (I-US), the H4C are intended to achieve a step change in circular utilisation of resources and GHG emission reductions within given geographic areas. The European Community of Practice (ECoP) builds on and brings together ongoing work and expertise on H4C and I-US, initially supporting the H4C demonstrations funded under Horizon Europe. This project will develop both the ECoP network of stakeholders (commencing with funded H4C demo projects) together with an information and knowledge platform to enable stakeholders to take action. By creating awareness and fostering knowledge sharing between regions/cities and their industries, the H4C Platform will provide the tools and the evidence base for the approach to be adopted widely across Europe. A sustainable business model for deployment of the toolkit and services developed under the project will ensure the H4C ECoP is maintained well into the future. This consortium led by ISQ not only includes world leaders in the field (experienced in delivery, training, stakeholder engagement, models and methodologies) but also has the specific committed support and participation of many of the European bodies (those representing regions, cities, industry, educational institutions etc) that are needed to both disseminate the project outcomes and initiate implementation. Working closely with its sister consortium H4C-Europe, the H4C ECoP consortium is confident of delivering an ECoP and H4C platform that will achieve the target of greater circularity and carbon neutrality through profitable actions that also benefit communities/civil society.

EIT-H2Cities is a XKIC collaboration driving industry-led systemic innovation for the uptake of hydrogen (H2) applications in mobility. EIT UM, EIT-M and CKIC will collaborate with industry actors to create Hydrogen Living Labs in two RIS cities. Together with the local community, innovators will test new products and changes in the energy chain. Hereby, EIT-H2Cities will break the circular conundrum of high production cost, low demand, no infrastructure, and address cities lack of capacity to build a replicable roadmap for local authorities looking to integrate hydrogen into their net-zero strategies. On budgetary division, in EIT-H2Cities the three KICs aim to consume less than 20% of the total costs. Defined innovation partners cover 48% of total costs and new legal partners will cover 32% of total costs. The decision to have legal partners within the XKIC is innovative in itself but also drives up co-financing and ensures city and industry full engagement in the initiative with a higher likelihood of financial success. Furthermore, EIT-H2Cities will build on programmes such as the Mission Platform and aims to become an umbrella association for wider engagement beyond the project lifespan, including for example district heating systems and local generation and storage. Our open partnership model will deliver EIT core KPIs on marketed innovation and SME/ Start-ups created, while a commercial pipeline and city replications will result from the experience of EIT-H2Cities. Dissemination, communication and exploitation activities will aim at inspiring follower cities and exposing citizens to the benefits of H2 applications in the mobility sector. Overall, EIT-H2Cities is a unique opportunity for a highly relevant XKIC that responds to community needs and enables EU companies to gain skills, capacity and market share in a rapidly growing economic sector.

NEB Junction collects, packages and validates stakeholder knowledge into Knowledge Gems, and makes them publicly available in an AI-supported, attractive and accessible IT Portal. We cooperate with a broad set of NEB stakeholders - and stakeholders that might not yet be interested or are traditionally excluded - using multi-stakeholder sessions, learning journeys and stakeholder assemblies. Our Monitoring System bridges cultural and creative perspectives with environmental, economic, social, health and governance aspects, making sustainable solutions more relatable and attractive to policy makers, public authorities, construction ecosystems and local communities. We connect stakeholders with the NEB Facility through NEB Coffees, mapping of R&I gaps, foresight activities and more, to distill NEB at your Fingertips - Pathways to NEB Implementation, and a Roadmap for the NEB Facility. We work with creative and cultural sectors and industries to generate a sense of belonging to NEB, combining AI-supported analysis with human reflections on NEB values, needs and expectations in a co-design approach. All of this work is supported by a Vision co-created with the stakeholders, enabling its long life-time also after the end of the project. The NEB Junction is created and managed by 8 experienced NEB partners: AIT, Ars Electronica, Climate KIC, DemSoc, DOWEL, ERRIN, ICLEI, and NTNU as Project Coordinator.