Consortia led by Roche Diagnostics GmbH and the Helmholtz Society’s Dresden lab were picked as the winners of a year-long contest to start the next round of innovation clusters for the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
The Roche group, also including Abbott Laboratories’s Spanish unit, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the University of Oxford, will form InnoLife, a health-innovation cluster of more than 140 businesses, research centres and universities from 14 EU countries. Its task, according to the EIT, is “to promote entrepreneurship and develop innovations in healthy living and active ageing”.
The Helmholtz group, also including KGHM Polish Copper S.A., the RISE Research Institute of Sweden and the University of Milano-Bicocca, will form RawMatTERS, a raw materials cluster made up of more than 100 partners from 20 EU countries. The work of this cluster will focus on “sustainable exploration, extraction, processing, recycling and substitution”, the EIT’s statement reads.
The clusters will take the form of what the EIT calls Knowledge and Innovation Communities, or KICs for short. These are large consortia of universities, companies and others that band together under the EIT banner to dream up new products and services, start new companies, and train a generation of budding entrepreneurs. The EIT, based in Budapest, currently co-funds three other KICs – in information technologies, energy and climate change. The addition of two new consortia, in life science and raw materials technologies, was approved in 2014 as part of the EU’s €80 billion, seven-year Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Ursula Redeker from Roche Diagnostics GmbH, and coordinator of the health cluster, said “We are thrilled to win the EIT’s call. By 2018, we are aiming to create 70 start-ups per year and have 1 million students participating in our educational online programmes per year.”
Jens Gutzmer from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, and coordinator of the raw materials team, said he had glued together the “strongest consortium ever created in the raw materials field”. His goals are equally ambitious. “By 2022, we are aiming to create, among others, 64 start-ups and five new primary/secondary sources of critical raw materials,” he said.
"Ageing societies and our dependence on raw materials pose serious challenges to the EU. I am therefore very pleased to see the EIT getting these two strategic partnerships underway,” said Tibor Navracsics, EU Commissioner for Education.
The first three KICs on climate change, ICT and sustainable energy were formed in 2009. Each KIC has about 30 core partners led by five or six ‘colocation centres’ – in essence, hubs for the lab work, teaching and marketing of innovations that the KICs were formed to do.Martin Kern, EIT’s interim director, said the KICs “are open partnerships. They begin with a limited number of partners and they grow – that’s the whole spirt of the EIT.”
The EIT provides about 25 per cent of the KIC budgets, with the rest coming from national or regional governments, other EU sources, and private companies and investors. “For established KICs, we invest around €80 million per year. There’s a leverage ratio of three on EIT finance through partners’ contribution,” Kern said.
The initiative is an unusual effort – originally proposed by former Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso – to stimulate more innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe. Since 2010, the KICs have incubated more than 450 business ideas and created 75 start-ups. The EIT counts 61 new products and services and 215 students have graduated with EIT-labelled degree programmes.
€4 million seed funding
“Our task is now to rapidly launch EIT Health and EIT Raw Materials so that they can deliver innovation and growth", said Kern. “We want to swing into action as soon as possible,” he added.
In order to get the new research teams up and running, the EIT will fork out a cash grant of up to €4 million.
The raw materials KIC will have hubs in six locations: Espoo, Metz, Wroclaw, Luleå, Rome and Leuven. The health KIC will be headquartered in Munich with six additional hubs in London, Stockholm, Barcelona, Paris, Heidelberg and Rotterdam.
Both KICs are expected to go into business shortly after signing a seven-year contract with the EIT in 2015.
Also, the KICs are able to develop their own policy for IP. “It’s up to the KICs and their partners. The EIT does not prescribe a specific policy,” said Kern.
The EIT will launch the next KIC competition in 2016 focusing on future food supplies and added-value manufacturing. There are tentative plans for a competition on urban mobility for 2018.
Press release here
Full list of partners for Health KIC here
Full list of partners for raw materials KIC here
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