EIC Work Programme 2025 – Keys facts and novelties
EIC Work Programme 2025 – Keys facts and novelties
The European Commission recently published the European Innovation Council (EIC) Work Programme for 2025. Meant as an instrument to fund innovative projects in Europe, we give you a summary of the main novelties compared to 2024, the deadlines, and some tips to prepare a successful proposal!
Novelties in 2025 in short:
- Higher budget: With a total of €1.4 billion, there is an €200 million increase compared to the budget of 2024
- Introduction of a new funding instrument: Strategic Technologies for Europe (STEP) with €300 million available to provide scale-up finance of up to €30 million and facilitated access to the Invest EU Venture Debt support.
- EIC Pathfinder: Increased focus on Impact and how the described technologies will be applied for technological solutions.
- EIC Transition: Allow more applicants to the interview stage to present their idea.
- EIC Accelerator: The overall funding is reduced to €15 million to €10 million, since higher amounts are available through the STEP instrument. Applicants must have completed TRL5 to be eligible for funding.
The total budget of the EIC Work Programme 2025 is €1.4 billion allocated to the four funding mechanisms – the EIC Pathfinder, EIC Transition, EIC Accelerator, and (new) the Strategic Technologies for Europe (STEP). In this article, we will focus on the EIC Pathfinder and Transition. For a detailed discussion of the EIC Accelerator and STEP program, you can find a great summary in Science Business.
EIC Pathfinder
The EIC Pathfinder consists of 2 different instruments: The EIC Pathfinder Open and the EIC Pathfinder Challenges. The EIC Pathfinder Open is, as the name suggests, open to all fields of science and innovation. This is a highly competitive call, with over 1,119 proposals submitted for the 2024 deadline, and a success rate below 4%. To be successful with a proposal, you need to present a novel, break-through development, a high-risk/high-gain project idea, and an immaculate proposal, addressing all required sub-headings of the template.
Despite the high competition, strong consortia with highly innovative project ideas have a chance of success – for example project THOR, where the MIC innovates towards artificial tissue engineering, or ERMES, which will start in April 2024, and in which the MIC will develop a microfluidic platform for the analysis of molecular messengers.
The EIC Pathfinder Challenges are pre-defined by the European Commission and target domains of specific interest. For 2025, the challenges will be:
- Biotech for Climate Resilient Crops and Plant-Based Biomanufacturing
- Generative-AI based Agents to Revolutionize Medical Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer
- Towards autonomous robot collectives delivering collaborative tasks in dynamic unstructured construction environments
- Waste-to-value devices: Circular production of renewable fuels, chemicals and materials
The EIC Pathfinder Challenge proposals are meant to create a portfolio of projects for each Challenge, that will be established to explore different perspectives, competing approaches or complementary aspects of the Challenge. It is therefore worth studying the call text precisely, to see where the individual proposal fits inside of the portfolio, since each Challenge is sub-divided into different area. The complete information on the individual Challenges can be found on the website of the European Innovation Council. The funding rate for the EIC Challenges call is 100%, as for all of the grants in this program. The eligible costs will take the form of a Lump Sum budget. If you need more information on the calculation of a Lump Sum budget, you can read our article Lump sum funding for beginners.
EIC Transition
If you have already worked on the development of a specific technology in the scope of an EU-funded project, and completed Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3, you might want to take your development further, and apply for the EIC Transition!
The proposed technology must be the result of either a previous EIC Pathfinder project, or stem from an ERC proof-of-concept or Horizon Europe Pillar 2 project. In case of doubt, you can check the list of eligible projects for the 2025 call in the file on the website of the European Innovation Council.
The budget takes again the form of a Lump Sum funding, as it does for the EIC Challenges call. The EIC Transition evaluation process differs slightly from classical grant schemes, as it includes a pitch presentation after the first evaluation.
Only teams that are successful at the pitch will be successful with their application. With a budget of €98 million and grants of €2.5 million, approximately 40 projects will be funded. Since the EIC Transition is gaining in popularity and more and more proposals are submitted each year, the success rate of 2025 is expected to be around 10%.
In order to have a successful proposal, you have to have conducted a preliminary market research, identified potential markets and explored potential competitors. Your project will only be funded if you can convincingly present a promising business case! During the implementation of your project, you can build your team and develop your idea towards commercial success. Here at the MIC, we have successfully applied to the EIC Transition and are currently in the implementation phase of project GALILEO, developing a new wide-range flow sensor to advance the microfluidics field. Let us know if you think microfluidics could be a part of your technology!
Develop your idea with us!
The MIC has a strong track record with over 50 successful projects in the last 10 years, most from the H2020 and Horizon Europe Work Programme, including one project from the predecessor EIC Fast Track to Innovation programme (project FIDA), 2 EIC Pathfinder Open projects (ERMES and THOR) and one EIC Transition project (GALILEO). We believe that microfluidics has many advantages and can be applied to a variety of research fields. Just have a look at our Research Projects and see how they contribute topics ranging from Health and Medicine to Environment and Chemistry.
Are you interested to apply to the EIC programme, or are you curious if microfluidics can be used in your project? You can always drop us an email at partnership[at]microfluidic.fr.
