Recently the Innovation Radar, the European Commission repository of innovations, has reached an unprecedented result: in 2023 the estimated number of innovations with market potential that are present and promoted by the platform - and are so funded by the European Union - are 10.000.
The Innovation Radar was originally set up to make it easier to discover innovations with high potential funded by the EU. It contains information on one quarter of all EU-funded research and innovation actions launched by the European Commission under Horizon 2020, that taken together, have received more than 10 billion euros in EU funding.
Since its foundation in 2015, the Innovation Radar’s goal has been to make the outputs of EU innovation funding easily discoverable by investors, but at the same time it wanted to make projects available to anyone interested, be they citizens, journalists or other innovators.
What is the Innovation Radar and how it works
The Innovation Radar is a European Commission initiative to identify high potential innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. As we said before, the main goal of this platform is to allow every citizen, public official, professional and business person to discover the outputs of EU innovation funding and give them a chance to seek out innovators who could follow in the footsteps of companies such as Skype, TomTom, ARM Holdings, all of whom received EU funding in their early days.
Thought as a first step to achieving such ambitions, the platform is a vehicle to spread information about EU-funded innovations from high-quality projects and make them visible and accessible to the public.
So how does this platform work? The Innovation Radar platform builds on the information and data gathered by independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing projects funded by the EU (under Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, LIFE Programme, Framework Programme 7 (FP7) or the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP)).
These experts also provide an independent view regarding the innovations in the projects and their market potential, using data from a survey developed by the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CONNECT) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. The Innovation Radar is supported by Dealflow.eu platform that enables investors and corporates to search & discover the most promising EU-funded innovations.
More information about the Innovation Radar methodology is available here.