Cooperation with EEN

1. Admissibility conditions:

Applications must be submitted before the call deadline.

Applications must be submitted electronically directly via the Funding & Tender Opportunities portal Electronic Submission System (accessible via the call topic page in the Search Funding & Tenders section); or indirectly via the EIC Platform where applicants will be redirected to the Portal. Paper submissions are NOT possible.

Applications must be readable, accessible, printable and complete (contain all the requested information and all required annexes and supporting documents) and must be submitted using the forms provided inside the Electronic Submission System.

The Application Form for Pathfinder and Transition will have two parts:

• Part A (to be filled in directly online) — contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (future coordinator and beneficiaries and affiliated entities), the summarised budget for the proposal and call specific questions;
• Part B (to be downloaded from the Portal Submission System, completed and then assembled and re-uploaded as PDF in the system) — contains the technical description of the project.

Annexes and supporting documents will be directly available in the Submission System and must be uploaded as PDF files (or other formats allowed by the system).

The page limits and sections subject to limits will be clearly shown in the application templates and must be respected. Excess pages will be automatically made invisible, and will not be taken into consideration by the evaluators.

In no circumstances shall the same costs be financed twice by the budget (article 191 of the Financial Regulation). Applicants will be asked at a later stage for further documents (for legal entity validation, financial capacity check, bank account validation, etc).

Proposal page limits and layout: 30 pages

2. Eligible countries:

In order to be eligible for funding, the applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries:

• · Member States (including overseas countries and territories or OCTs)
• · Eligible non-EU countries, including Associated Countries

Concerning eligible associated countries and third countries, please see Annex 3 of the 2021 EIC Work Programme.

3. Other eligibility conditions:

The eligible entities which may apply to this call are the prospective members of the Enterprise Europe Network, gathered in consortium for the ‘Coordination Office’ on behalf of the regional and national EEN consortia that received a letter inviting them to start grant agreement preparation for EEN 2022-2025 call under the Single Market Programme. Following the successful evaluation of proposals, a grant for this coordination and support action will only be awarded to the members of the Enterprise Europe Network which have signed a grant agreement for the ‘new’ Enterprise Europe Network which will start operating in 2022.

4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion:

The financial capacity check will be done on the basis of the documents you will be requested to upload in the Participant Register during grant preparation (e.g. profit and loss account and balance sheet, business plan, audit report produced by an approved external auditor, certifying the accounts for the last closed financial year, etc.). The analysis will be based on neutral financial indicators, but will also take into account other aspects, such as dependency on EU funding and deficit and revenue in previous years.

The check will normally only be done for the coordinator and if the requested grant amount is more than EUR 500 000, except for:

• public bodies (entities established as public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) or international organisations, and
• cases where the individual requested grant amount is not more than EUR 60 000 (low-value grant).

For more information, see Rules on Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment.

Operational capacity

This assessment of operational capacity will be carried out during the evaluation of the award criterion ‘quality and efficiency of the implementation’, on the basis of the competence and experience of the applicants and their project teams, including its operational resources (human, technical and other) or, exceptionally, the measures proposed to obtain it by the time of the implementation of the tasks.

If the evaluation of this award criterion leads a score above the applicable threshold, then the applicants are considered to have sufficient operational capacity.

Public bodies, Member State organisations and international organisations are exempted from the operational capacity check.

Exclusion

Applicants that are subject to EU administrative sanctions (i.e. exclusion) or are in one of the following exclusion situations banning them from receiving EU grants can NOT participate:

• bankruptcy, winding up, affairs administered by the courts, arrangement with creditors, suspended business activities or other similar procedures (including procedures for persons with unlimited liability for the applicant’s debts),
• they are in breach of social security or tax obligations (including if done by persons with unlimited liability for the applicant’s debts),
• they are guilty of grave professional misconduct (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision-making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant),
• they are guilty of fraud, corruption, having links to a criminal organisation, money laundering, terrorism-related crimes (including terrorism financing), child labour or human trafficking (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision-making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant),
• they have shown significant deficiencies in complying with main obligations under an EU procurement contract, grant agreement or grant decision (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant),
• they are guilty of irregularities within the meaning of Article 1(2) of Regulation No 2988/95 (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant), or
• they have created under a different jurisdiction an entity with the intent to circumvent fiscal, social or other legal obligations in the country of origin or created another entity with this purpose (including if done by persons having powers of representation, decision making or control, beneficial owners or persons who are essential for the award/implementation of the grant).

Applicants will also be refused if it turns out that:

• during the award procedure they misrepresented information required as a condition for participating or failed to supply that information, or
• they were previously involved in the preparation of the call and this entails a distortion of competition that cannot be remedied otherwise (conflict of interest).

For more information on the rules for exclusion, please see Articles 136 ans 141 of the EU Financial Regulation 2018/1046.

5. Evaluation and award:

If admissible and eligible, the proposals for Coordination and Support Actions will be evaluated and ranked against the following award criteria:

• Award criteria, scoring and thresholds:
  

Evaluation scores will be awarded for the criteria, and not for the different aspects listed in the tables. For full applications, each criterion will be scored out of 5. The threshold for individual criteria will be 3. The overall threshold, applying to the sum of the three individual scores, will be 10.

• Submission and evaluation processes: described section 8 of the call document and the Online Manual.

Call document and annexes:

EIC Work Programme 2021

Standard application form (HE CSA)

HE General MGA v1.0

Additional documents:



EU Financial Regulation 2018/1046

Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment

EU Grants AGA — Annotated Model Grant Agreement

Funding & Tenders Portal Online Manual

Funding & Tenders Portal Terms & Conditions

Funding & Tenders Portal Privacy Statement

Additional links:

https://eic.ec.europa.eu/index_en

https://community-smei.easme-web.eu/

Deliver support actions to women innovators and widening countries applicants to EIC Accelerator as well as Seal of Excellence (SoE) holders through creating synergies with EU partners and programmes such as the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN).

For more details, including the expected outcome and impact, see the EIC Work Programme 2021.

1.Support to innovative companies in a) widening countries (300-400 per year) and b) women-led innovative companies across the whole EU and HE 3rd pillar Associated Countries (600-800 per year) aiming at preparing high quality EIC Accelerator proposals.

The support should take the form of a 3-5 day (on average) service package of 1-to-1 advice to strengthen the business case of potential applicants through reinforcement of their business, innovation and partnering strategies (e.g. research institutes, investors, clients, business partners). It should focus on strengthening the company’s case in each part of the European Innovation Cuncil (EIC) application. The objective is to increase the number of quality proposals and filter out companies not suitable for the EIC.

2.Support to EIC Accelerator SoE holders (300 per year) to obtain funding from private and/or public sources.

The support should take the form of a 3-5 day (on average) service package of 1-to-1 advice,including:

• Identification of the relevant alternative funding source(s);
• Advisory support for the application process to the identified funding source, including possible reorientation of the project;
• Increase the pitching capacity to present project ideas to investors and introduce regional/national/European investors (including pitching events with investors);
• Identify other needs than funding (e.g.: partnering, business support) and refer to relevant EEN or relevant stakeholders’ services (incl. cross-border);
• Follow-up the supported SoE companies in their success in raising alternative funding and provide data back to the EIC.

3. Exchange of best practice within the EEN and access to additional expertise and private sector actors for the benefit of EENs in widening countries and Associated Countries to 3rd Pillar.

The objective is to bring EENs in widening countries on a par with more advanced EENs to deliver an adequate service under Action 1 and 2 and enhance their collaboration with public and private stakeholders (e.g.: innovation agencies, start-up associations, incubators, Business Angels associations, investors). This action should be delivered by the Coordination Office (see below) and includes but is not limited to:

• Drawing up and implementing a specific action plan based on needs and challenges faced by EENs in widening countries;
• At least 1 training and exchange of best practice per EEN consortium in widening countries (in addition to existing EEN ‘exchange of experience’ scheme);
• At least 2 days of 1-to-1 cross-border coaching by more experienced peers/experts per EEN consortium in widening countries to draft EIC Accelerator proposals (from EEN members and other experts from other Member States and Associated Countries).

Consortium –Coordination office

In order to implement this action the proposals should be submitted by a consortium of maximum 5 EEN members host organisations with adequate EU geographic representation, fairly distributed budget and well-founded regional knowledge and experience directly related to the scope of above actions (including widening countries). The consortium should act as a ‘Coordination office’ responsible for:

• Organisation and coordination of all activities, including communication and dissemination;
• Equal and fair allocation of implementation of all actions to other EEN members in all regions of the Member States and Associated Countries 3rd pillar. These other EEN members, which are not members of the Coordination Office consortium,could be subcontractors or act as third parties providing in-kind contributions against payment. In countries/regions in Associated Countries where there are no EEN members, a non-EEN entity could receive the subcontract/third party funding.
• Reporting on indicators, supported companies’ profiles and success stories through an IT tool. This IT Tool should be developed by the coordination office in consultation with the EIC. Data should be collected to enable the production of aggregated descriptive statistics per region to understand the profile of companies being served supported across Member States and Associated Countries. This IT tool should minimise reporting burden for the EEN members.

The EU estimates that between 5% and 10% of the total budget of the CSA would allow for an optimal coordination and project management of the activities of the Coordination office.Satisfaction surveys should be carried out for each action and SMEs’ satisfaction rate should be at least 80%. All above actions need to be carried out in complementarity and avoiding duplication of efforts with other EC actions and programmes e.g. EIC, NCPs, EIT KICS, different parts of EEN and therefore EEN needs to work in close co-operation with them.

For more details, including the expected outcome and impact, see the EIC Work Programme 2021.

A broader talent pool will apply to the EIC and will therefore ultimately improve the innovation capacity of the Member States and Associated Countries to 3rd pillar and enhance the European innovation ecosystem. This will be achieved through:

• 70% of SMEs served by EEN through this action will apply for the EIC Accelerator and 8% of served SMEs will receive EIC funding or SoE.

There will be also more realised SoE projects through access to private and public funding (i.e. 50% of served SoE will apply for funding and 25% of these SoE will receive funding).

For more details, including the expected outcome and impact, see the EIC Work Programme 2021.