Horizon Europe Launches Calls, Holds Info Day
The European Union's Horizon Europe program has active grant calls focused on a clean environment and zero pollution. Separately, the European Innovation Council held an information day in Zagreb, Croatia, on February 18 to highlight new funding opportunities for researchers.
- Horizon Europe is the EU's key funding program for research and innovation with a budget of €95.5 billion for 2021-2027, which includes €5.4 billion from the NextGenerationEU recovery fund. - The "clean environment and zero pollution" calls are part of Horizon Europe's Cluster 6, which focuses on Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment, and aims to advance knowledge on pollution sources and support prevention and remediation measures. - The European Innovation Council (EIC), a key component of Horizon Europe, has a budget of over €1.4 billion for 2026 to support breakthrough technologies and scale up innovative companies. - The EIC provides funding through several schemes, including the Pathfinder for visionary research (grants up to €4 million), the Transition for turning results into innovations (grants up to €2.5 million), and the Accelerator for start-ups and SMEs (grants up to €2.5 million and equity investments from €0.5 to €10 million). - GovTech initiatives across Europe, such as Lithuania's GovTech Lab, are increasingly seen as a way to modernize public administration by moving away from large, rigid tenders to more agile, outcome-based contracts that foster a more diverse ecosystem of innovators. - Case studies in public sector digital transformation, like the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) which created the unified GOV.UK platform, demonstrate the potential for service design to streamline administrative processes and improve the citizen user experience. - Service design principles, which are increasingly being adopted by public sector bodies, emphasize designing services based on user needs rather than internal organizational structures and using iterative, data-driven approaches. - Horizon Europe itself is a complex, multi-stakeholder service system, and understanding its structure—from the high-level policy goals of the European Green Deal to the specific application processes of its funding calls—provides a real-world case study in designing for intricate user journeys.
