KICs bring together businesses (large corporates and SMEs, including start-ups), research centres and higher education institutions as partners, creating a favourable environment for creative thought and innovation to flourish, allowing innovative products and services to be developed in every area imaginable, new companies to be started or accelerated; and a new generation of entrepreneurs to be trained. KICs create a pan-European network and carry out a whole range of activities that cover the entire innovation chain – including training and education programmes, reinforcing the journey from research to the market, innovation projects as well as business incubators and accelerators. KICs have been conceived so that they are able to react in an effective and flexible way to new challenges and changing environments. This allows them to produce innovative services and products and create new markets in order to help to address major societal challenges.