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

FUNANBULIST - FUnctional Nucleic Acids as Versatile SMart BUilding BLocks in Non-ConventIonal SolvenTs

Specific programme: HORIZON EIC Grants
UPV/EHU Partner Status: Coordinator
UPV/EHU PI: Thomas Shafer

Project start: 01/05/2023
Project end: 30/04/2026

Brief description: Almost half of the production costs in the rapidly growing chiral chemicals market is spent on the downstream processing costs due to challenging separation tasks and demanding levels of purification. FUNAMBULIST aims at a radically new science-enabled production of fine chemicals by emulating the ingenuity of biological processes in an engineered environment. In this way, FUNAMBULIST aims at overcoming the current dogma that fine chemicals are produced via traditional synthetic routes in organic solvents. FUNAMBULIST creates a modular toolkit that enables a radically different approach to design chemical reactions in the fine chemicals market by abandoning the current, artificial gap between biological and chemical function.