“A great day for innovation in Europe”

 

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has chosen climate change, sustainable energy and information and communication technology as the subjects of its first three programmes, following a hearing with six short-listed candidates in Budapest yesterday (16 December).

“Today is a great day for innovation in Europe,” said Martin Schuurmans, chair of the EIT’s governing body, announcing the three winning bids to form Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). These entities, each co-located at several centres in Europe, will bring together industry and academics to work together and become world experts in each of their fields. They will be reference points not only for other academic groups, but also for companies and for investment in these areas of technology.

“This is the starting point of a new approach to innovation and knowledge-sharing,” said Schuurmans. “The KICs will be our test beds for an entirely new type of collaboration.”

The extent to which universities and businesses have come together to formulate KICs proposals is unprecedented, Schuurmans believes. The overall criteria in choosing the winners were leadership and research excellence. “The KICs ultimate real-life success and impact will clearly depend on a number of key elements: co-locating people from across the innovation chain to work closely together, clear leadership and a can do approach, as well as entrepreneurship and a real commitment from the private sector,” Schuurmans said.

The EIT is putting up 25 per cent of the funding for KICs, and will help with the launch of the projects.

The Climate change KIC, to be co-located in Berlin, London, Paris, Zurich and Randstad, says that by 2014 it will create a community with “world renowned innovation capacity and climate change knowledge.” As such it will be the natural place for companies to co-locate climate change R&D centres.

Among the 16 core partners involved in this KIC are ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), Imperial College London, Bayer, Cisco and Thales.

“We should be judged by our ambition to make an impact on problems on the scale of climate change,” not just by academic publications and citations, Peter Chen, professor of chemistry at ETH and a representative for the climate KIC, told Science|Business after the winners were announced. “We cannot do this without partners in the private and public sector.”

The Energy KIC – or InnoEnergy, whose members include the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology, Stuttgart University, SAP, Électricité de France and Total - will be co-located in Karlsruhe, Grenoble, Eindhoven/Leuven, Barcelona, Krakow and Stockholm. It aims to become “the leading motor for innovation in the field of sustainable energy.”

“By setting up a European network with KIC InnoEnergy, we are confronting the challenge of a sustainable and climate-neutral energy supply - we want to use the network to close the innovation gaps in the energy sector in Europe,” Professor Hans-Jörg Bauer, spokesman for the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology’s energy centre and for KIC InnoEnergy, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the winning KIC for the future information and communication society, EIT ICT Labs, will promote an “unprecedented proliferation of Internet-based services” with its co-locations in Berlin, Eindhoven, Helsinki, Paris, and Stockholm. This consortium features companies including Deutsche Telekom, universities including KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm and research centres including France’s INRIA.

“Becoming a KIC is a tremendous opportunity for us to make Europe the global leader in ICT Innovation” said Magnus Madfors, acting CEO of EIT ICT Labs. “We have the team, the experience, and we are ready to start building a world class innovation ecosystem, turning the potential of the Future Information Society into benefits for the citizens of Europe and the world.”