General conditions

1. Admissibility conditions: 

• Applications must be submitted before the call deadline.
  
  
• Applications must be submitted electronically via the Funding & Tenders Portal Electronic Submission System (accessible via the Topic page in the Search Funding & Tenders section). Paper submissions are NOT possible.
  
  
• Applications (including annexes and supporting documents) must be submitted using the forms provided inside the Submission System (NOT the documents available on the Topic page — they are only for information).
  
  

Applications must be complete and contain all the requested information and all required annexes and supporting documents:

1. Application Form Part A — contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (to be filled in directly online)
2. Application Form Part B — contains the technical description of the application (to be downloaded from the Portal Submission System, completed and then assembled and re-uploaded as PDF in the system)
   
   
3. Mandatory annex: there are no mandatory annex.
   
   

Your application must be readable, accessible, printable.

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

Applications are limited to maximum 15 pages (Part B). Evaluators will not consider any additional pages. 

2. Eligible participants:

In order to be eligible, the applicants must be:

1.  A natural person or a legal entity established in one of the Member States (including overseas countries and territories, (OCTs)) or Associated Countries to Horizon Europe
2. Proposed solutions that harm the environment or social welfare are NOT eligible.
3. The proposed solutions or activities contained in the application must have taken place in a Member State (including overseas countries and territories, OCTs) or in an Associated Country to Horizon Europe.
4. The proposed solutions must relate to ongoing or completed initiatives. In case of ongoing activities, only work achieved by the submission deadline will be considered for the prize
5. Winners both from the Challenge and the Impact Prizes of previous editions of the European Social Innovation Competition are not eligible.
6. Applicants that have already received an EU or Euratom prize cannot receive a second prize for the same activities.

3. Other eligibility conditions: described in Annex B of the Work Programme General Annexes

Award criteria, scoring and thresholds

1. Award criterion 1 - Degree of innovation: the degree to which any new product, service or model is new for its given context in connection to the challenge of the competition. The idea must be new and innovative within its given socio-economic and geographical context;
2. Award criterion 2 - Impact: the potential of the proposal to tackle the competition challenge. The applicant must demonstrate how the proposed solution will contribute to solving the challenge;
3. Award criterion 3 - Viability: the financial and environmental sustainability of the proposal;
4. Award criterion 4 - Scalability and replicability: the idea's potential to scale and be replicated, be it at regional, national, European or global level.

Submission and evaluation processes: Applications will be subject to a formal evaluation by a jury.

If there are more than 60 applications, there will be a pre-selection phase to select the best 60 applications to pass to the jury review. Otherwise, all eligible applications will pass directly to jury review.
The pre-selection panel and jury usually have a different composition, but jury members may participate in the pre-selection panel. 

The pre-selection panel/jury will evaluate each application against the award criteria.
On the basis of the evaluation by the jury (and after the mandatory checks: ethics review, security scrutiny, legal entity validation, non-exclusion, double funding and plagiarism, etc), the awarding authority will decide on the award of the prizes to the 3 winners.

The 3 winners ranked 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd will receive a prize. Moreover, once the competition will be finished, all 15 finalists (ranked 1^st to 15^th) will be invited to attend the Social Innovation Academia. This Academia will be an event where the finalists will receive business acceleration services (e.g. mentoring or training) with the aim to help them developing and/or scaling up their solutions submitted to this competition

Indicative timeline for evaluation:  the jury panel will evaluate the proposals between June and July 2023. The results of the evaluation will be published in Q4 2023 or Q1 2024.