This week EWGIC released its position paper on EIC Accelerator under Horizon Europe in view of the ongoing Horizon Europe negotiations. Created in 2014 under the “SME instrument” name, the EIC Accelerator has become the largest and most competitive public funding scheme for deeptech startups in Europe.
 
With success rates falling rapidly below 1% (over 5,000 submissions expected in October 2020 vs funding available for 30-40 companies), the EIC Accelerator has fallen victim to its popularity. Today, success in this programme requires a very high-quality application, and a fair amount of luck (represented by the subjective opinion of third-party evaluators).
 
To address these issues, the EIC Task Force has suggested to implement a radically new evaluation process with a pre-screening stage (short application), a regular written stage (full application) and an interview stage. The scoring scale (out of 15) is replaced with a simple “go / no go” approach. Most importantly, only two submissions would be allowed at each stage before a 24-month cooling off period.
 
Overall, these changes are likely to be favourable to the best applicants as they will reduce the application “noise” (sub-par applications that will not go through the pre-screening) and reduce the number of resubmissions overall. The EC will thus provide higher quality evaluations of a smaller set of full stage applications, and therefore reducing the “luck factor” of the evaluation process.
 
However, the approach will also put a higher responsibility on a smaller number of evaluators which, as a result, must be carefully selected and trained in the context of 3 main challenges:

·         Challenge 1: reducing oversubscription 
·         Challenge 2: supporting a fair evaluation with clear evaluation criteria
·         Challenge 3: recruiting skilled and trained evaluators

With its members having supported over 1000 successful applicants in the programme, EWGIC is proposing 15 possible improvement areas that should result in a fair and transparent evaluation process (read them here).
 
Will the new EIC Accelerator reduce the impact of luck vs skills in the selection of the European deeptech champions? 
 
EWGIC believes the suggested changes are supporting a more transparent and fair evaluation, but only when combined with clear and consistent evaluation criteria, as well as a thorough overhaul of the expert pool recruitment and training processes. 
 
Access the short version of the position paper here (4 pages)
Access the full version of the position paper here (12 pages)

The Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF) 2021-2027 is undergoing intense negotiations within the European Institutions. Horizon Europe’s budget has been decreased by 5 billion euros, straying away from the European Commission’s initial ambitious plan. The European Council and Parliament (EP) have just a few months left to complete their negotiations.

EWGIC, the European Working Group of Innovation Consultants, welcomes the European Council’s agreement on the MFF and the Next Generation EU budgets, but regrets the treatment of European research and innovation funding especially related to Horizon Europe.

EWGIC supports Parliament’s stance that the Council’s budget deal needs to be transformed to a more future-oriented approach. We are now calling the European Parliament to ensure Horizon Europe will get back at least to the original proposal that the EC made in 2018 of 83.5 B€ (2018 prices). So that R&I can actually contribute to our continent's recovery and allow for the development of added-value products and solutions developed in Europe.

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.
 
Download the EWGIC’s Position Paper below: