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Dr Martin Schuurmans, chairman of the EIT governing board
Climate change, sustainable energy and ICT get backing from European Institute of Innovation and Technology
The EIT has chosen its first three Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) from a shortlist of six candidates.
The successful candidates focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation (the Climate-KIC), sustainable energy (KIC InnoEnergy), and the future information and communication society (EIT ICT Labs).
Dr Martin Schuurmans, chairman of the EIT governing board, told EIRMA’s annual conference in June 2009 that KICs were meant to be networks of excellence, focused on a single topic, with the work being done in one or a just a few places. Major topics in each KIC would have a CEO-style leader, a business plan targeting particular results, an intellectual property rights policy, and a strong EIT brand.
Funding would range between €50 million and €100 million a year for 7 to 15 years, with the EIT providing 25% of the funds, a further 25% to 50% coming from existing programs, and the KIC partners providing the remaining 50% to 25%.
Schuurmans’ promise to the conference to act quickly to establish the KICs seems to have been fulfilled. The deadline for proposals was 27 August 2009 and the first three KICs were named on 16 December.
Schuurmans said then: “The KICs will be our test-beds for an entirely new type of collaboration across the innovation web, bringing together our most excellent resources from higher education, research, business and entrepreneurship. Through the KICs we want to generate real impact in terms of new business creation, entrepreneurship and societal benefit.”
He added: “It is now our foremost task to get the KICs energised by mid next year and to immediately start a substantial learning process based on the wealth of knowledge and good ideas that has been put into all the proposals.
We must get down to action now
“The EIT will help the KICs launch their activities immediately. We must get down to action now.”
Climate KIC
The Climate-KIC's mission is to accelerate and stimulate the innovation for this transformation and ensure benefits for Europe.
It will initially focus on achieving excellence in four areas: assessing climate change and managing its drivers, transitioning to low-carbon resilient cities, adaptive water management and zero-carbon production.
Each of these areas will have a world-renowned lead responsible for the entire chain from education to commercialisation. Work will be embedded in five locations responsible for creating local innovation ecosystems to drive entrepreneurship and venture creation, whilst linking into a network of implementation sites.
The core academic partners are Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, and one academic consortium from each of France, Germany and the Netherlands. Commercial partners range from Cisco to DSM, EDF, SAP and Shell. Full details are here.
KIC InnoEnergy
KIC InnoEnergy will focus on the most technologically difficult parts of the Strategic Energy Technology Plan. It will be organised and managed as a business.
Its academic input is coming from a series of innovation eco-systems that are already established across Europe. These include clusters based in Karlsruhe, Germany; the Alps Valley around Grenoble; the Eindhoven-Leuven axis in the Benelux countries; around Barcelona in Spain; in Poland, and in Sweden. Major industrial partners include ABB, EDF and Total. Full details are here.
EIT ICT Labs
Finally, the EIT ICT Labs will try to foster international top talent and involve under-utilised innovation and entrepreneurial resources such as women, students, non-core IPR, and cost-driven innovations for the next billion users. The KIC will use an open innovation approach and draw on resources in five centres - Berlin, Eindhoven, Helsinki, Paris, and Stockholm – with the hope of turning them into hotspots of ICT innovation. Commercial partners include SAP, Siemens, Philips, Nokia, France Telecom and VTT, among others.
Each of the key locations will have core and affiliate partners, drawn from both industry and academia. The full details are here.
What’s interesting about the three KICs announced so far is that each has made its own decision about what it wants to achieve, how it will be organised to achieve those goals, and the types of partnerships and engagement it wants to foster. Each KIC is also drawing on European notions of innovation clusters, helping to focus input from a huge array of academics, public research organisations, and industrial partners through distributed ‘co-location centres’.