Game-changing innovations for European launch solutions

Specific conditions

Expected EU contribution per project

The Commission estimates that an EU contribution of EUR 5 million would allow these outcomes to be addressed appropriately used in the following way:

• The first five ranked winners will receive the same prize of value EUR 950 000.
• The rest of the budget (EUR 250 000) will be allocated to manage the prize implementation and remunerate the experts used.

Available budget

Type of Action

Preparatory Action - Reward Prize

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:

• Application Form Part A — contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (to be filled in directly online)
• 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).

Your application must be readable, accessible, printable.

Applications are limited to maximum 70 pages (Part B). Evaluators will not consider any additional pages.

You may be asked at a later stage for further documents (for legal entity validation, bank account validation, ethics review, declaration of honour, etc).

For more information about the submission process (including IT aspects), consult the Online Manual.

Eligibility conditions

Eligible participants (eligible countries)

In order to be eligible, the applicants must:

• be legal entities (natural persons, public or private bodies) [For the legal definition, see Article 159 EU Financial Regulation 2024/2509].
• be established in one of the EU Member States considering that decision-making centre and activities related to research, development, manufacturing, and operations are located in territories of Member States of the EU
• not be subject to restrictions originating from Member States outside of the EU.

Applicants must register in the Participant Register — before the call deadline — and will have to be validated by the Central Validation Service (REA Validation). For the validation, you will be requested to upload documents showing legal status and origin.

Specific cases

Entities without legal personality — Entities which do not have legal personality under their national law may exceptionally participate, provided that their representatives have the capacity to undertake legal obligations on their behalf, and offer guarantees for the protection of the EU financial interests equivalent to that offered by legal persons [See Article 200 (2)(c) EU Financial Regulation 2024/2509].

EU restrictive measures — Special rules apply for certain entities (e.g. entities subject to EU restrictive measures under Article 29 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and Article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU)^[1] and entities covered by Commission Guidelines No 2013/C 205/05^[2]). Such entities are not eligible to participate in any capacity.

Eligible activities

Eligible activities are the ones set out in section 2 above.

Geographic location (target countries)

Applications must relate to activities carried out in Member States of the European Union.

Ethics and values

Activities must comply with the highest ethical standards and the applicable EU, international and national law on ethical principles.

Moreover, they must respect basic EU values (such as respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights, including the rights of minorities).

The activities must comply with:

• ethical principles (including the highest standards of research integrity) and
• applicable international, EU and national law

and may not:

• aim at human cloning for reproductive purposes
• intend to modify the genetic heritage of human beings which could make such changes heritable (with the exception of research relating to cancer treatment of the gonads, which may be financed), or
• intend to create human embryos solely for the purpose of research or for the purpose of stem cell procurement, including by means of somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Applications involving ethics issues will have to undergo an ethics review to authorise funding. Applications that did not respect the above ethical principles and standards cannot be awarded a prize.