With a new start-up visa, Bulgaria joins the Baltic states in offering foreign entrepreneurs a fast-track to residency

EU’s innovation fund will give out €1.6B in grants and equity to start-ups and innovators in 2023 – and is promising smooth sailing after a bumpy start

Seaweed is increasingly important as a raw material. But while plans to scale up farming have been welcomed for highlighting this potential, they are also seen as overlooking innovation in the industry

The partnership aims to streamline EU funding and encourage data sharing to give a much-needed boost to clean hydrogen

The first steps are underway to devise new ways of financing cybersecurity start-ups and scale-ups, to fill a €1.75B investment gap. Currently, European companies ‘tend to underperform against their international peers’ and ‘generally raise less funding,’ says the Commission

The region’s entrepreneur scene is fast developing, but it still lags far behind western Europe in the number of companies and the amount of capital they attract

Fund backed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia sees supporting academic start-ups as an important first step in bridging the gap between academia and business in central and eastern Europe

New rules for approving microorganism-based plant protection products coming into effect in November don’t go far enough to lift the regulatory drag on innovation. This will hold back efforts to phase out chemical pesticides

Details revealed in leaked work programme for 2023 imply the European Commission expects there will be less money for the innovation funding agency in 2024, after the pandemic recovery fund runs out

EIC was conceived as a bottom up innovation fund, but the move to backing top down and targeted research is now filling gaps that researcher-led projects cannot