The European Commission announced yesterday that over 2,000 sustainable innovation companies from 38 different countries have applied for financial support of €7.8bn from the one-off EIC Accelerator Green Deal call. We can expect a 4% success rate for this call, a similar level as for the October 2019 cut-off.

When Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined Europe’s “green recovery” plan to the European Parliament last week, it was understood that the Green Deal would be placed at the centre of the EU’s recovery effort.

The Green Deal has the capacity to help the EU economy recover from the COVID-19 crisis, with proposals of this specific call focusing on the following aspects:
- climate mitigation
- the transition to a clean & circular economy
- zero pollution ambitions
- toxic free environments
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Read more here.

We face the most serious healthcare crisis of the last 100 years, a crisis that is highly impacting all components of our economic infrastructure. Through the release of this new Position Paper, the EWGIC calls on the EU Parliament and European Commission to take immediate action, through implementing an EIC Accelerator Airdrop that can offer liquidity to start-ups and innovative SMEs affected by the current crisis.
 
This position paper focuses on SMEs and the role that the European Commission must play to protect them, via the Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator programme.
The EWGIC has summarised the most urgent problems to solve, with regards to the EIC Accelerator Programme, highlighting the following challenges to address:

1. Oversubscription will have serious adverse effects on the programme unless the effort is made to increase budgets or curb the number of submissions,
2. evaluation criteria must be clarified to ensure fair treatment of all proposals,
3. running EIC projects must be protected, with additional pre-financing and simplified periodic reporting, and
4. it’s time for an #EICAirdrop !

The EC, along with EASME, REA and the EIB, all have a strong influence on the future of European SMEs, which is why the EWGIC now urges them to save our European SME champions.