The EIC Transition was launched in 2021 as one of the major novelties under the European Innovation Council and implemented in its first year of the implementation of the fully-fledged EIC in acting as a bridge instrument between Pathfinder and Accelerator programmes. The EIC Transition aims at developing disruptive innovations based on breakthrought technologies and embraces technological development, business model development to accelerate the time-to-market of such disruptive innovations. It has the potential to generate spin-offs, technology transfer activities or even licensing agreements.
The EIC Transition envisages an evaluation process based on two different steps: i.) the independent evaluation from three different experts taking approximately two months and half for evaluation; ii) and the EIC Jury interview, where a team composed of five members of the consortium are invited to present their innovative idea, the business model behind it and the technological advancements to be improved to reach its objectives.
APRE, as coordinator of the Access2EIC network, interviewed Professor Alessandra Balduini of the University of Pavia, who won a Transition Grant in 2021 for the SilkPlatelet project. The project aims at “Closing the European gap towards a large scale ex vivo platelet production built upon a silkbased scaffold bioreactor”; with a duration of 36 months and will receive a European contribution of around 2,473 M €. We asked Prof. Balduini to tell us about its proposal preparation and the last evaluation step: the EIC Jury interview.
The interview is available here: https://access2eic.eu/publications/publication/