Building the Next Generation of Digital Champions

In 2023, the EIT Digital Academy continued educating the next-generation digital champions whose talent combines key digital technology with expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship. Both EIT Digital Incubation and Growth Services helped our students and graduates to turn their business ideas first into minimum-viable products, then ventures and get these to fly.

EIT Digital Master School recruited 160 new students to cohort 2023. A total of 268 students graduated from the School in 2023. Fifteen universities located in nine countries provided seven different master’s programmes, including the Romanian Babeș-Bolay University which joined the programme intake the first time. The share of females enrolling into the programmes followed a positive trend and their share of the 2023 enrolled cohort was an all-time high of 37%. In 2023, 80% of the students were offered some type of funding option, from 30% and up to 100% funding. In addition, the Deferred Tuition Payment Plan (sponsored by the European Investment Fund, EIF) was continuously offered to both EU and non-EU applicants.

In the Education and Skills domain, two EIT Digital lead EU-awarded consortium ‘SPECTRO’ and ‘EMAI4EU’ started their work to deepen and amend Europe’s digital skills by designing and delivering totally new double-degree master’s programmes (ISCED Level 7, 120 ECTS). ‘SPECTRO’ focuses on Cybersecurity and Robotics and ‘EMAI4EU’ on Artificial Intelligence with a specialisation in Emotion Artificial Intelligence and a minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In addition, the ‘SME4DD’ project started to deliver short-term training programmes for the SMEs in three strategic digital technologies for Europe (Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity).

Nine two-week Summer School programmes and three fully commercially organised one-week programmes were delivered in 2023 with 364 students attending. Out of them, 40% were paying attendees. Each Summer School programme is organised to bring together education, research and innovation within the context of a socially relevant theme and has a clear topic within a societally relevant area of ICT technology application.

EIT Digital Professional School continued delivering its mission to keep European working professionals at the forefront of today's fast-paced digital technologies. The School renewed several courses targeting the upskilling needs of professionals in sectors impacted by emerging digital technologies. This culminated in launching the brand-new 'Generative AI Essentials' -online course in the last quarter and gaining almost 1,000 attendees by the end of the year. Also, the highly successful self-paced Coursera MOOC portfolio of more than 40 courses continued growing in 2023 and peaking at 29,000 unique learners.

The EIT Digital Venture Program was executed for the sixth consecutive year in nine regional editions and covering 22 RIS countries. The programme helped 47 innovator teams from 19 countries with an innovative business idea, Proof-of-Concept or prototype to finalise their minimum viable product (MVP) and start their venture. A total of 40 new ventures were created thanks to the Venture Program 2023 edition.

The EIT Digital Innovation Factory supported 16 pan-European entrepreneurial teams from education, research, and business organisations in launching or boosting their digital DeepTech ventures in 2023. During the year, the programme executed nine activities selected in the previous years’ last cut-off from January to June 2023, and the 2023 cut-off 1 cohort of seven activities running from July to December 2023. In the Open Innovation Factory 2023 cut-off 2 call for proposals, eight activities were selected to have an execution timeframe from January to June 2024.

To match the needs of our industrial partners, we transformed our Innovation Factory into an open innovation programme, where corporates and startups work together on a six-month agile work plan to deliver a POC or a new deep tech product to be launched to the market. A total of 22 new products were introduced to the market thanks to the programme in 2023.

All Open Innovation Factory activities commit to contributing to EIT Digital’s financial sustainability by offering an equity share in the incorporated venture in recognition of EIT Digital support. At the end of 2023, EIT Digital hold slightly more than 300 ventures’ equity commitments.

In 2023, EIT Digital Growth Services supported 28 scaleups. The directly supported scaleups secured over 65M€ of funding, resulting in the highest-ever recorded success fees for EIT Digital. An additional almost 20M€ funding was secured by scaleups which have received at least two months of support from EIT Digital Growth Services in the last 3 years. Growth Services’ 2023 performance can be considered exceptionally good, knowing that the Venture Capital market was almost in a standstill mode in the first quarter of 2023 in a climate of high uncertainty due to the rapid surge of interest rates in Europe and globally.

In 2023, the tenth edition of the EIT Digital Challenge scaleup competition was organised (renamed as EIT Digital Champions as of 2024). The competition is the biggest pan-European contest for digital Deep Tech scaleups awarding in 2023 ten companies with free-of-charge access to the EIT Digital Growth Services programme and to benefit from 12 months of dedicated support services in international Access to Finance and Business Development. In 2023, the Challenge attracted a record of 459 submissions, from 50 countries with more than one-third of the applications coming from companies led by women.

In 2023 we launched a new online programme designed for entrepreneurs and executives to enhance their startup skills, the EIT Digital Speed Master. It includes weekly interactive sessions focusing on management, strategy, business development, and access to finance. The programme is divided into four modules and 15 lessons. A total of 35 startups attended the Speed Master in 2023. One-third of the attendees were female. Attending Speed Master was made mandatory for activities selected to EIT Digital Open Innovation Factory as of 2023.

Inspired by strategic partnerships with some of our key industrial partners, we introduced in the second half of 2023 a new exclusive platform, the Corporate Innovation Club. It offers a platform for our corporate network to exchange ideas and best practices, address the challenges of open innovation principles, find new ways of cooperation and better engage with them as well as to find customers, investors or acquirers for our startup portfolio. The Club meets twice a year face-to-face and twice online. Alongside other industrial partners, Bosch, T2, Indra, and STMicroelectronics welcomed the initiative and joined the club as founding members from the very beginning. Our goal is to double the membership base by the end of 2024.