€100m ‘Fast Track to Innovation’ announced

The European Commission has announced details of a new €100m Fast Track to Innovation (FTI) pilot action and five innovation prizes under Horizon 2020.

The FTI aims to support Europe’s economy by offering innovative businesses and organisations grants to give a final push to get great ideas to market, whilst the prizes offer a reward for technological breakthroughs of high societal relevance. The Commission says the initiatives will underscore the drive to support innovation in Europe as part of the first, two-year Horizon 2020 work programme.

Commenting, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner, said: “The FTI and the new prizes will provide even more opportunities for innovators across Europe to get involved. With these measures we are contributing to increase Europe’s competitiveness and create growth and jobs.”

The FTI scheme will be open to applications from January 2015 and will support small consortia of three to five organisations with strong business participation to give promising ideas the last push before entering the market. It is open to ideas in any area of technology or application and to any legal entity established in the EU or in a country associated to Horizon 2020.

The contests for the five innovation prizes will start in late 2014 and early 2015. The prizes, worth €6m in 2015, cover three different thematic areas of research: health (‘Reduction of the Use of Antibiotics Prize’ and ‘Food-Scanner Prize’), the environment (‘Reduction of Air Pollution Prize’) and ICT (‘Collaborative Sharing of Spectrum’ and ‘Optical Transmission Prize’).