Deadline: 06-Oct-21
The European Commission has announced the applications for Deepening the Functioning of Innovation Support.
Scope
Proposals should address the following activities:
- Develop approaches to set up and improve the functioning of innovation brokers, which have the capacities to find individual innovative grassroots ideas at an early stage as well as practice needs or innovative opportunities.
- These innovative ideas should then be developed with the support of the owner of the idea and a number of relevant actors with complementary knowledge into an EIP-AGRI interactive innovation project, using methods ensuring co-ownership of the initiators and partners in the project.
- Seed funding as used for EIP-AGRI Operational Group projects is often a good solution to accompany this process, but also other approaches such as “innovation advice” or “innovation coaching” are an option to investigate.
- Explore how such innovation support approaches could be embedded in the national/regional AKIS, in particular through useful connections with advisors, and how they can be linked to other broader innovation support mechanisms, including research, advisors and CAP networks at Member State or regional level.
- Investigate and compare among Member States how the governance of such innovation support could be organised at the level of the managing authorities (single “one-stop-shop” service or mixed model with several smaller and/or bigger innovation support services, or…) taking into account the great variety of contexts in Member States and regions.
- Cover all 27 EU Member States in the project to ensure learning from diversity.
- Make use in all those countries of experts who understand and are able to make an accurate interpretation of the national/regional contexts and its impact to help develop the ideal solution for that Member State.
- Projects should have a minimum duration of 6 years, investing most in the very first years, and use the support from the knowledge and innovation experts of the SCAR-AKIS Strategic Working Group to discuss project strategy and progress in the various stages of the project.
- They must implement the multi-actor approach, including existing experienced innovation support services as partners which can share their methods and help develop solutions in other contexts.
- As foreseen in the Multi-Actor Approach requirements, provide all outcomes and materials to the European Innovation Partnership ‘Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability’ (EIP-AGRI), including in the common ‘practice abstract’ format for EU wide dissemination, including as well as to national/regional/local AKIS channels and to the EU-wide interactive knowledge reservoir in the requested formats.
Funding Information
Grant amount is equal to or greater than EUR 500 000 except for:
- public bodies (entities established as a public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) or international organisations; and
- cases where the individual requested grant amount is not more than EUR 60 000 (lowvalue grant).
Expected Outcomes
Project results are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:
- Helping innovation support services to tackle innovative ideas related to the policy objectives linked to Cluster 6, such as farm viability, agro-ecology, climate issues, pesticide reduction, reduction of water use and pollution, short supply chains, generational renewal, etc, as well as the European Green Deal, the Farm to Fork Strategy and the CAP, the Biodiversity Strategy and the wider bioeconomy research and policies.
- Contribute to the CAP cross-cutting objective of modernising the sector by fostering and sharing knowledge, innovation and digitalisation in agriculture and rural areas, and encouraging their uptake.
- Projects shall provide overall support to generate practical approaches ultimately leading to better capturing of emerging needs and/or innovative opportunities, knowledge co-creation, in relation to the new obligation for Member States under the CAP post-2020 to have innovation support services in place, taking into account national and regional contexts.
- The outcomes shall connect actors, policies, projects and instruments to speed up creation of innovative solutions, in particular by:
- creating added value by better linking research, education, advisors and farming practice and encouraging the wider use of available knowledge which can serve the innovative idea;
- connecting innovation actors and projects; resulting in faster co-creation of ready-to-use innovative solutions, spreading them into practice and communicating the research needs of practice to the scientific community.
Eligibility Criteria
- Any legal entity, regardless of its place of establishment, including legal entities from non-associated third countries or international organisations (including international European research organisations) is eligible to participate (whether it is eligible for funding or not), provided that the conditions laid down in the Horizon Europe Regulation have been met, along with any other conditions laid down in the specific call topic.
- A ‘legal entity’ means any natural or legal person created and recognised as such under national law, EU law or international law, which has legal personality and which may, acting in its own name, exercise rights and be subject to obligations, or an entity without legal personality.
- To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e:
- the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions;
- the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States;
- eligible non-EU countries:
- countries associated to Horizon Europe
- low- and middle-income countries
For more information, visit https://bit.ly/3xoJuhF