Building the Next Generation of Digital Champions

In 2022 the EIT Digital Academy continued to educate the next-generation digital champions whose talent combines key digital technology with expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship. EIT Digital Incubation and Growth Services helped them to turn their business ideas first into minimum-viable products, then ventures and get these to fly.

EIT Digital Master School recruited 219 new students to cohort 2022, and a total of 562 students graduated from the School. A total of 16 universities attended the programme in 2022. Ten two-week summer school programs and one fully commercially organized, one-week program were delivered in 2022 with a total of 440 students attending. Out of them, almost 40% were paying attendees.

The EIT Digital Venture Program helped 31 innovator teams with an innovative business idea, PoC or prototype to finalize their minimum viable product (MVP) and start their venture. This work was amended with The EIC - EIT Digital Venture Building Programme incubation boot camp for  EIC-supported innovators to transform knowledge into impact and gain entrepreneurial skills to build and boost their deep tech start-up. Ten EIC beneficiaries were selected for the EIC - EIT Digital Venture Acceleration Programme.

The EIT Digital Innovation Factory supported pan-European entrepreneurial teams from education, research, and business organizations in launching or boosting their digital DeepTech ventures. A total of 26 new ventures were launched and 43 new products were introduced to the market thanks to EIT Digital Open Innovation Factory 2022.  EIT Digital Growth Services supported 33 companies and 14 EIC pilot scale-ups. The companies in the EIT Digital portfolio were able to secure over 110m€ of funding and the four EIC pilot scale-ups supported by the  Growth  Services were able to raise 41m€ in 2022.

In 2022, EIT Digital organized the ninth edition of the EIT Digital Challenge scaleup competition, the biggest pan-European contest for digital Deep Tech scaleups awarding six winners with a full year of tailored international growth support from the EIT Digital Accelerator scaleup program worth €50,000 to scale up their business.

In late 2022, the Growth Services Access-to-Market team started to work with Access-to-USA program which will be deployed in a pilot format in early January 2023.