Co-Creation with Public and Private Buyers of Innovations

 1. Admissibility conditions: described in annex 2 "General conditions for applications"  of the 2021 EIC Work Programme. 

Applications must be submitted before the call deadline.

Applications must be submitted electronically directly via the Funding & Tender Opportunities portal Electronic Submission System (accessible via the call topic page in the Search Funding & Tenders section); or indirectly via the EIC Platform where applicants will be redirected to the Portal. Paper submissions are NOT possible.

Applications must be readable, accessible, printable and complete (contain all the requested information and all required annexes and supporting documents) and must be submitted using the forms provided inside the Electronic Submission System.

The Application Form for Pathfinder and Transition will have two parts:

• Part A (to be filled in directly online) — contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (future coordinator and beneficiaries and affiliated entities), the summarised budget for the proposal and call specific questions;
•  Part B (to be downloaded from the Portal Submission System, completed and then assembled and re-uploaded as PDF in the system) — contains the technical description of the project.

Annexes and supporting documents will be directly available in the Submission System and must be uploaded as PDF files (or other formats allowed by the system).

The page limits and sections subject to limits will be clearly shown in the application templates and must be respected. Excess pages will be automatically made invisible, and will not be taken into consideration by the evaluators.

In no circumstances shall the same costs be financed twice by the budget (article 191 of the Financial Regulation). Applicants will be asked at a later stage for further documents (for legal entity validation, financial capacity check, bank account validation, etc).

Proposal page limits and layout: 30 pages as described in Part B of the Application Form available in the Submission System.

 2. Eligible countries: described in annex 3 "Eligible Associated Countries and Third Countries" of the 2021 EIC Work Programme. 

 In order to be eligible for funding, the applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries:

• Member States (including overseas countries and territories or OCTs)
• Eligible non-EU countries, including Associated Countries. 

Concerning eligible associated countries and third countries, please see Annex 3 of the 2021 EIC Work Programme.

 3. Other eligibility conditions: described in section VI.7 of the 2021 EIC Work Programme. 

The action should be implemented by a consortium of minimum two partners from two Member States or Associated Countries (with at least one partner from a Member State).
 

 4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion: as described in annex 2 "General conditions for applications"  of the 2021 EIC Work Programme.

Financial capacity

The financial capacity check will be done by us on the basis of the documents you will be requested to upload in the Participant Register during grant preparation (e.g. profit and loss account and balance sheet, business plan, audit report produced by an approved external auditor, certifying the accounts for the last closed financial year, etc.). The analysis will be based on neutral financial indicators, but will also take into account other aspects, such as dependency on EU funding and deficit and revenue in previous years.

The check will normally only be done for the coordinator and if the requested grant amount is more than EUR 500 000, except for:

• public bodies (entities established as public body under national law, including local,
• regional or national authorities) or international organisations, and
• cases where the individual requested grant amount is not more than EUR 60 000 (low value grant).

For more information, see Rules on Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment.

Operational capacity

This assessment of operational capacity will be carried out during the evaluation of the award criterion ‘quality and efficiency of the implementation’, on the basis of the competence and experience of the applicants and their project teams, including its operational resources (human, technical and other) or, exceptionally, the measures proposed to obtain it by the time of the implementation of the tasks.

If the evaluation of this award criterion leads a score above the applicable threshold, then the applicants are considered to have sufficient operational capacity.

Public bodies, Member State organisations and international organisations are exempted from the operational capacity check.

For the EIC Accelerator, the operational capacity of the applicant will be assessed during the evaluation of the award criterion ‘Level of risk, implementation, and need for Union support’. Experts will judge whether each participant has, or will have in due time thanks to EIC support, sufficient operational capacity to successfully carry out their tasks in the proposed work-plan. This assessment will be based on the competence  and experience of the applicant, including their operational resources (human, technical, other) and the measures proposed to secure these resources by the time of the implementation of the tasks.

Exclusion

Applicants that are subject to EU administrative sanctions (i.e. exclusion) or are in one of the following exclusion situations banning them from receiving EU grants can NOT

participate:

•  bankruptcy, winding up, affairs administered by the courts, arrangement with creditors, suspended business activities or other similar procedures (including procedures for persons with unlimited liability for the applicant’s debts), 

• they are in breach of social security or tax obligations (including if done by persons with unlimited liability for the applicant’s debts),

• they are guilty of grave professional misconduct (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision-making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant),

• they are guilty of fraud, corruption, having links to a criminal organisation, money laundering, terrorism-related crimes (including terrorism financing), child labour or human trafficking (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision-making or control, beneficial owners or persons who  are essential for the award/implementation of the grant),

• they have shown significant deficiencies in complying with main obligations under an EU procurement contract, grant agreement or grant decision (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant),

• they have created under a different jurisdiction an entity with the intent to circumvent fiscal, social or other legal obligations in the country of origin or created another entity with this purpose (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant).

• Applicants will also be refused if it turns out that:
• during the award procedure they misrepresented information required as a condition for participating or failed to supply that information, or
• they were previously involved in the preparation of the call and this entails a distortion of competition that cannot be remedied otherwise (conflict of interest).

•  Award criteria, scoring and thresholds: described in annex 2 "General conditions for applications" of the 2021 EIC Work Programme. 

If admissible and eligible, the proposals for Coordination and Support Actions will be evaluated and ranked against the following award criteria:

Evaluation scores will be awarded for the criteria, and not for the different aspects listed in the tables. For full applications, each criterion will be scored out of 5. The threshold for individual criteria will be 3. The overall threshold, applying to the sum of the three individual scores, will be 10.

•  Submission and evaluation processes: described section 8 of the call document and the Online Manual.