Culture and Creativity Business Plan 2024-2025

The results of Business Plan 2024-2025 should contribute to the expected outcomes set out in the EIT Culture & Creativity Strategic Agenda 2024-2027 over the medium term, and to the wider expected impacts and respective targets over the longer term.

Objective:

• Relevant and appropriate EIT Culture & Creativity Business Plan for 2024-2025 implementation of the KIC’s multiannual strategy, demonstrating its excellence (including objectives and ambition; methodology; financial sustainability), its impact (including KIC’s pathways towards impact; measures to maximise impact – dissemination, exploitation and communication) and its quality and efficiency of the implementation (including work plan and resources at portfolio level; capacity of participants and KIC Partnership as a whole).
• To address EIT Culture & Creativity’s target societal challenges and Knowledge Triangle Integration (KTI), contributing to achieving the future high-level results and impacts included in the EIT Impact Framework.
• KIC objectives/priorities in the Business Plan, describing its objectives using SMART criteria (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) and why are they pertinent to the KIC Strategic Agenda.

The KIC Business Plan 2024-2025, describing the activities at portfolio level, shall be aligned to the EIT Culture & Creativity Strategic Agenda in the framework of the EIT Strategic Agenda 2021-2027.

Expected Impact:

In response to this topic, EIT Culture & Creativity should show how the KIC could contribute to the outcomes and impacts described in the KIC Strategic Agenda and the KPIs in the EIT Impact Framework following the specific EIT Culture & Creativity’s Impact Pathways, the likely scale and significance of this contribution, and the measures to maximise these impacts in the context of Horizon Europe. Each activity in education, innovation, business creation and EIT RIS included in the Business Plan should contribute to at least one core EIT KPI.

Eligible activities

• innovation activities and investments with Union added value, including facilitating the creation of innovative start-ups and the development of innovative businesses in complementarity with the EIC and the InvestEU Programme, fully integrating the higher education and research dimensions to attain a critical mass and stimulating the dissemination and exploitation of results;
• innovation-driven research, experimentation, prototyping and demonstration in areas of key economic, environmental and societal interest and drawing on the results stemming from Union and national research, with the potential to strengthen the Union’s competitiveness at international level and find solutions for the major challenges faced by European society, including those relating to health and the digital market;
• education and training activities in particular at master’s and doctoral level, as well as professional training courses, in areas with the potential to meet future European socio-economic and socioecological needs and which expand the Union’s talent base, promote the development of innovation-related skills, the improvement of managerial and entrepreneurial skills and the mobility of researchers and students, and foster knowledge-sharing, mentoring and networking among the recipients of EIT education and training activities, including those that are EIT-labelled;
• actions as part of the pilot higher education initiative to better integrate HEIs in innovation value chains and ecosystems and bring them together with other key innovation players from the knowledge triangle and thereby improve their innovation and entrepreneurial capacity;
• outreach activities and the dissemination of best practices in the field of innovation with a focus on the development of cooperation between higher education, research and business, including the service and financial sectors, and, where relevant, public and third sector organisations;
• RIS activities, fully integrated in the KICs’ multiannual strategy and linked to the relevant smart specialisation strategies, in order to strengthen innovation capacity and to develop sustainable innovation ecosystems with a view to decreasing the disparities and divide in innovation performance across the Union;
• to seek synergies and complementarities between KIC activities and existing Union, national and regional programmes, in particular the EIC, other European Partnerships and missions of Horizon Europe, as appropriate;
• to mobilise funds from public and private sources, in particular seeking to raise an increasing proportion of their budget from private sources and from income generated by their own activities;
• to provide, on request, information on research and innovation outputs and results, and related intellectual rights, developed pursuant to the activities of the KICs, and on the relevant inventors.

The proposal shall cover activities in line with the EIT Regulation, the EIT Strategic Innovation Agenda 2021-2027, the Single Programming Document (2023-2025) of the EIT, the EIT Impact Framework and the KIC Strategic Agenda (which later as a final version will be Annex 1 of the Partnership Agreement to be signed between EIT and the KIC as a precondition of signing the Grant Agreement under this Invitation).

Business Plan proposal shall be submitted by KIC LE on behalf of the KIC partnership. The KIC LE will become a beneficiary and signatory of the Grant Agreement. Entities associated to the KIC LE (e.g. Co-Location Centres (CLCs)24 with a legal personality, etc.) shall accede to the Grant Agreement as co-beneficiaries or shall become affiliated entities to the KIC LE. Other entities (both KIC partners and non-KIC partners) can be recipients of financial support to third parties. The applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:

– the Member States (MS) of the European Union (EU) including their outermost regions;

– the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States;

– eligible non-EU countries;

– Countries associated to Horizon Europe.