European Innovation Council (EIC)

European Innovation Council (EIC)

The European Innovation Council (EIC) promotes breakthrough innovation with scale-up potential at the global level.

It focuses mainly on breakthrough, deeptech and disruptive innovation, targeting especially market-creating innovation.

The EIC also supports strategic technology and innovation challenges which will take into account the priorities of the Horizon Europe strategic plan.

Areas for funding:

  • Pathfinder funding: for advanced research, supporting early stage development of future and emerging breakthrough, market-creating and/or deep tech technologies
  • Transition funding: to help researchers and innovators develop the pathway to commercial development for promising research results
  • Accelerator funding: to support individual SMEs, startups and small mid-caps to bridge the financing gap between late stages of research activities and market take-up, to effectively deploy breakthrough, market-creating innovation and scale-up companies where the market does not provide viable financing
  • Additional activities such as prizes and fellowships, and business added-value services

More information on the EIC is available here.

EIC Projects

FantastiCOF - Fabricating and Implementing Exotic Materials from Covalent Organic Frameworks

Specific programme: HORIZON EIC Grants
UPV/EHU Partner Status: Coordinator
UPV/EHU PI: Aurelio Mateo

Project start: 01/11/2022
Project end: 31/10/2025

Brief description: Superconducting devices based on Josephson Junctions (JJs) are among the most versatile devices in superconducting electronics. Yet challenges remain because conventional JJs are created using a variety of materials that have been identified as a source of noise, dissipation and dephasing, and also, that raise compatibility problems during the fabrication process. FantastiCOF aims at developing a disruptive methodology to prepare exotic highly crystalline superconducting moiré materials, which will exceed the current challenges and limitations of existing materials and methods. Achieving this would represent an important step forward in the fabrication of low-noise JJ devices that will accelerate the development of the next generation of superconducting electronic devices with enhanced performance and sensitivity. FantastiCOF is an archetype of a perfectly balanced high risk/high gain project. It proposes visionary research to tackle the challenges in the synthesis of moiré materials and in the fabrication of low-noise JJs (ambitious and beyond the state-of-theart), through the development of novel synthetic concepts (bottom-up) and the use of materials (2D covalent organic frameworks) with no precedents in the field, opening the door to a totally unexplored terrain (high risk), but providing tangible pathways towards achievements (solid risk assessment). The inherent high-risk is countered by a strongly interdisciplinary research team composed of 6 partners (5 academics + 1 SME) with different yet highly complementary backgrounds and demonstrated experience in their corresponding fields. Furthermore, FantastiCOF will have a high impact on a broad range of existing and emerging technologies that employ JJs (high gain), such as metrology, medicine, and quantum information technologies.