Image: EIT Health
Commission directs Covid-19 innovation support to fledgling EIC rather than established EIT
The head of the health network of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology has said he is “frustrated” that the EIT has received no additional funding in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite a similar EU funder being showered with extra money.
“I am a little bit frustrated,” said Jan-Philipp Beck (pictured), the chief executive of EIT Health, referring to €150 million in extra funding the European Commission gave the European Innovation Council on 30 April. “We haven’t really seen any of that moving in EIT’s direction.”
The EIT, a fully established EU programme created in 2008, supports innovation through eight Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs), including EIT Health. The EIC, which is in the last year of a three-year pilot phase, supports individual companies and entrepreneurs.
Networks of innovators can respond faster in a crisis than single companies, Beck suggested. He said one of the six winners of the EU’s recent ‘hackathon’ competition to find innovative solutions to Covid-19 previously received support from two EIT networks, illustrating the funder’s track record.
MEP Maria da Graça Carvalho said EIT Health should “have a central role” in the response to Covid-19—for instance, by gathering data for the development of treatments—and that the organisations in the KIC are “key experienced stakeholders whose work needs to be orchestrated to contribute to the solution”.
Amid the uneven approach, EIT leaders have been desperately shifting its annual budgets to try to keep the fledgling companies it supports afloat. EIT head Martin Kern announced on 30 April he had pulled forward €100m in payments, originally due in August, to help EIT-backed companies facing liquidity crises.
One-third of the EIT’s activities might have to be “seriously reoriented, if not cancelled”, another third “will need adjust-ments” and the remainder “will be able to continue”, said Kern.
“The KICs are all about cooperation, collaboration, bringing people together—many things that now won’t go ahead,” he said. The 2020 KIC budget, about €540m, will require “enormous adjustment” to shift resources from abandoned activities to those that are viable but struggling, Kern said. Money saved by cancelling conferences and summer schools will be reallocated to other activities.
The EIT has made a formal request for additional funding, Kern said. The Commission said that the EIT’s model means it can move money more easily than the EIC, without the need for additional funds.
This article also appeared in Research Europe