Climate Neutral and Circular Innovative Materials Technologies Open Innovation Test Beds (IA)

Deadline: Mar 30, 2022  
CALL EXPIRED

Climate Neutral and Circular Innovative Materials Technologies are essential in enabling the transition towards a European decarbonised economy. They can contribute to a stronger circular economy, a cleaner Industry, a more sustainable growth and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which is fully in line with the Green Deal Strategy. To maintain its competitive advantage in clean Materials technologies the EU needs to increase significantly the large-scale deployment and demonstration of new technologies across sectors and across the single market, building new innovative value chains. Climate Neutral and Circular Innovative Materials Technologies Open Innovation Test Beds (OITBs) will support companies, especially SMEs, to become world leaders in clean products and technologies.

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Increase significantly the large-scale deployment and demonstration of Climate Neutral and Circular Innovative Materials Technologies across sectors and the single market, as well as to build and maintain new innovative value chains;
• Reduce the technological risk of innovative materials and products, thus attracting more investors, and cut the time to market;
• Support companies, especially SMEs, to become world leaders in clean products and technologies by setting up a new generation of Open Innovation test Beds focused on the creation of Business Opportunities and Sustainability. Enhancing ownership and engagement of the society through active collaboration and empowering people and communities as actors of the climate neutral and circular transition ;
• Translation of industrial needs into scientific problems and concrete solutions, increased awareness and uptake by industry, and effective access of relevant stakeholders to know-how and advanced tools/infrastructure.

The following specific activities should be considered:

• Establish Open Innovation Test Beds (OITB) by upgrading existing or developing new materials facilities and pilot lines, and made available services for the design, development, testing, regulatory and environmental assessment and upscaling to industry and interested parties, specially SMEs;
• Specific focus will be given to the sustainability of the ecosystem by designing new funding instruments that would complement the already existing ones and provide further support for industrial uptake of climate neutral and circular innovative materials technologies in key strategic value chains;.
• Proposals should include actions designed to facilitate cooperation with other projects, to enhance user involvement and to reuse other projects results;
• Open access at fair conditions and cost as well as outreach and dissemination across Europe, based on a distinct methodology;
• Demonstrate measurable reduction of costs for product design, time-to-market and regulatory compliance by means of faster and cheaper evaluation of production process deviations. Relevant indicators and metrics, with baseline values, should be clearly stated in the proposal.

In order to avoid duplication, the work will be aligned with the third pillar on Open Innovation that will essentially focus on scaling up breakthrough and market-creating innovation by establishing a European Innovation Council, support the enhancement of European ecosystems of innovation and continued support to the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) OITB for: Clean hydrogen Technologies; Fuel cells and other alternative fuels; Carbon capture, storage and utilisation.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

Activities are expected to start at TRL 5 and achieve TRL 7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

Social Innovation
Socio-economic science and humanities