1.1 Million Euros to Support Organisations with Innovation Needs (Call for Challengers Open)

Applications for the InnoBuyer Call for Challengers are Open

The EU-funded project InnoBuyer is inviting public and private organisations with challenges to be solved, to apply for the Open Call for Challengers. A total amount of €1.1M is available to support 15 entities with unmet innovation needs, from any sector.

The InnoBuyer programme offers funding, expertise and access to top-notch SMEs, to speed-up the development of innovative solutions to solve organisations’ needs: from the identification of unmet innovation needs, to the procurement of innovations, including the co-creation of solutions with innovative companies.

“InnoBuyer has the potential to be a game-changer in the innovation procurement field by testing an agile and faster process to deliver better and more efficient services to face societal challenges.” – Miguel Gonçalves, Project Coordinator

How it works?

Public and private organisations (Challengers) can apply for InnoBuyer proposing up to 4 unmet innovation needs.

The 15 selected entities will join the InnoBuyer programme to participate in 4 support actions:

• Action #1: Expertise and 10.000€ funding support to develop a ‘Challenge Description’ which represents an improved version of the initially submitted unmet need, considering inputs from other relevant departments in the organisation such as IT, legal, and management, among others. The aim is to have business-oriented wording that can be appealing and well understood by innovative SMEs, to feed the Call for Solvers (Action #2).
   
• Action #2: Training and 10.000€ funding support to learn and adopt the latest methodologies on sourcing and market consultation, attend market dialogue sessions to share unmet needs with potential Solvers and identify interesting solutions in e-pitching sessions, among other opportunities to connect Challengers and Solvers. The InnoBuyer consortium will launch an open call to attract innovative SMEs to propose solutions to the challenges developed in Action #1, and Challengers are expected to actively participate in the evaluation and selection of Solvers and corresponding proposed solutions.
   
• Action #3: (Only for public organisations) Monitoring and up to 6.500€ funding support to co-create, deploy, test and assess a pilot, in collaboration with an innovative SME, to address the unmet innovation need described in Action #1 with a Solver selected in Action #2. (The Solver can get up to 58.500€ to develop the pilot.)
   
• Action #4: (Only for public organisations) Legal expertise and 15.000€ funding support to design and deliver Terms of Reference (ToR) for a simplified form of innovation procurement, to acquire the solution developed in Action #3.

“EISMEA is very glad to launch this call for Challenges which is open to public and private buyers willing to co-create innovative solutions with SMEs.

This call has the purpose to test a fast and agile avenue with the intention to cover partially the costs of procurers for their needs assessments, their market consultations, and their co-creation of pilots and solutions testing, where they will be able to involve EIC start-ups and companies.” - Jean-David Malo, Director of the European Innovation Council

Applications for the InnoBuyer Open Call for Challengers are open on F6S until the 31st of March 2023, at 17:00 CET (Brussels time).

An info webinar will be held on the 16th of February, at 12:00pm CET, providing potential applicants more information about the programme and the application process. An online training session on “How to master Innovation needs identification” will take place on the 1st of March, at 11:00am CET, for professionals who want to learn how to identify and describe unmet innovation needs, to boost demand-driven, effective and sustainable adoption of innovative solutions.

All the information about the InnoBuyer Open Call for Challenger is available here. 

About InnoBuyer

InnoBuyer is an EU-funded project that aims to become a testing ground and benchmark towards the implementation of a demand-driven methodology that brings together public and private organisations (Challengers) and innovative companies (Solvers) to jointly co-create innovative solutions, and speed-up the process leading to a concrete innovation procurement.
 

The project is operated by 3 partners with complementary expertise that form the core of a vibrant ecosystem: F6S (Ireland), CIVITTA (Estonia) and TICBIOMED (Spain).