EIT Communities

EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities: Fighting global challenges through partnerships

Our Knowledge and Innovation Communities are Europe-wide networks centred around fighting a specific societal challenge like healthcare issues or climate change. They are made up of partnerships between:

Higher education institutions
Research centres
Businesses and investors
Public and non-profit organisations

Each Community focuses on different societal challenges.

Discover our Knowledge and Innovation Communities

Once you’ve chosen your focus, our Communities support you every step of the way

By joining our Communities, you’re not just connecting to their network but learning and growing from them. They can help you:

Innovate products and services that address a global need (link to innovation page)
Start and develop your company (link to business page)
Learn new skills and develop your knowledge in different domains of tech (link to education page)

You can find your community by seeking out their local Innovation Hub

Hubs are where Knowledge and Innovation Community partners cluster for activities, workshops, networking, and more. We have Hubs in every European country and beyond!

Some Hubs actually specialise in a certain field or might have a special array of partners you might be interested to work with.

Find the EIT Hub you’re most interested to work with through our EIT Ecosystem Map

Each Knowledge and Innovation Community has its unique structure

They can each pick the legal status, internal organisation, and working methods that best suit their societal and financial goals. This autonomy helps them adapt and react to new challenges and changing environments across Europe.

Our funding model ensures our accountability and integrity

We support each of our Communities through grant agreements. The grant goes directly to activities that:

Contribute to close partnerships between higher education, research, and business that foster innovation in Europe
Help the Knowledge and Innovation Community operate
Help boost Europe’s competitiveness and ability to resolve global issues

The Communities are encouraged and incentivised to generate revenues and leverage funding from outside of the EIT with the ultimate goal of becoming able to sustain their activities independently of the EIT. Such additional funding received by the Community must also clearly contribute to the Community’s strategy and objectives.

Learn more about our funding model

In accordance with Article 38 of the EU Financial Regulation 2018, the EIT has the obligation to publish the list of Grants awarded as well as the grant recipients. You can see the grants that we have allocated below:

Learn more about the EIT model

Take a deep dive into our innovation model in our Innovation Model Publication.

A model geared towards real impact

We regularly monitor and assess the performance of our Communities to better achieve our goals of increasing Europe’s global competitivity in innovation and fighting global societal issues.

This ensures that their strategies and activities:

Are aligned with our objectives and all applicable EU legislation and principles
Continuously improve in quality and get better at managing risk
Are integrating a diverse array of organisations and are producing tangible benefits for the European economy and society at large (such as creation of new businesses, sustainable products and services, and jobs)