Gateway to European Digital Innovation

EIT Digital as a pan-European organisation with 300 partners and 23 offices across EU27 and a Hub in Silicon Valley is ideally suited for tapping into the expertise and know-how of different and diverse stakeholders across Europe and wider, both from the private and public sectors including corporates, academia and SMEs and acting as a gateway to them and for them and to the European Digital Innovation.

In 2023 EIT Digital continued to expand its footprint in the European Digital landscape by opening new Regional Offices in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Thessaloniki (Greece) and signing a Letter of Intent for one in Riga (Latvia). External financing of our Edinburgh regional office was renewed. As a follow-up to the work done in 2023, EIT Digitals’ 23^rd office, the Athens Regional Office was opened in January 2024.

The European Digital industry’s demand for digital talent was served by the 268 entrepreneurial-minded digital domain masters who graduated from the EIT Digital Master School. The EIT Digital Professional School supported the industry in upskilling and maintaining its workforce's digital competencies by delivering nine courses and launching 13 self-paced online courses.

The European digital industry was injected with 44 new deep-tech digital ventures and market with 62 new deep-tech solutions delivered by the EIT Digital Open Innovation Factory and Venture Incubation programmes.

In 2023, EIT Digital Growth Services supported 28 companies. Our 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 ventures supported by EIT Digital Growth services in the last three years.

In 2023, EIT Digital started fully implementing its strategy to strengthen its reputation and position as the leading EU multi-stakeholder collaboration platform for digital technologies mobilising and deploying private and public funding to address the top priorities on innovation and skills of the European Union. As part of this strategy, EIT Digital entered various European Commission (mostly Horizon Europe, Digital Europe Programmes) calls and nationally funded collaboration projects and secured 15 of these projects either as the consortium coordinator or a member.

The total funding from the awarded EU and national projects mobilized by EIT Digital for its partner network in 2023 exceeded 100M€, thus proving that EIT Digital can leverage its 15 years of experience in managing EIT activities and grants by truly becoming a gateway to European digital innovation for its partner network.

In our Ecosystem Pillar, consortium ‘Metacities’ was awarded in the Interregional Innovation Investments (I3) Instrument call. Project ‘FAIR - Finnish AI Region’, part of the European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH) programme, started offering businesses low-threshold expertise in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, high-performance computing, and cyber security in January 2023.

In the Education and Skills domain, two EIT Digital lead consortiums ‘SPECTRO’ and ‘EMAI4EU’  started their work to amend and expand 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 SMEs in three strategic digital technologies for Europe (Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity).

Among the Innovation and Entrepreneurship focused EU Awarded projects in 2023 are ‘AI Boost’, ‘CONSOLE’, ‘CUSTODES’, ‘CyberSecDome’, ‘Deploy AI’, ‘FINEST Scaleup’, ‘MANOLO’, ‘SPIDER’ and ‘TANGO' – their domains ranging from cybersecurity to AI as well as from software development and virtual reality to bridging investors and deep tech companies of deep tech innovation ecosystem (for more details, please visit the EU Collaborations page on our website).

In 2023, we strengthened our connections with the European digital industry by joining the European Green Digital Coalition and the VR/AR Industrial Coalition. In addition, our CEO Federico Menna was appointed by DG CONNECT as a member of the ‘European Multi-Stakeholder Platform on ICT standardisation’ which is a high-level advisory body to European institutions on all matters related to the implementation of ICT-standardisation policies. Lastly, we entered into a strategic collaboration with the AI, Data and Robotics Association (ADRA). These memberships not only bring new delivery channels for our services but also open access to impact the future European digital industry, technology and skills policy formulation.

Following a successful one-year pilot, the European Innovation Council (EIC) and EIT Digital agreed to continue working together. Through the ‘EIC Ecosystem Partnerships and Co-Investment Support’ programme, the EIC beneficiaries can access our ‘Access to Talent’, ‘Access to Finance’, ‘Access to the US market’,  and ‘Speed Master’ programmes as well as all EIT Digital core ecosystem services. In 2023, EIT Digital also won the tender for the EIC Community Platform and its more than 15k user-strong member base’s management as well as platform revamping for a new user experience (UX). As part of the assignment, EIT Digital will organise community events, namely the European Innovation Council (EIC) schools, info days, trainings and workshops, create site content and provide helpdesk service.

In August, the European Business Angels Network (EBAN) and EIT Digital announced their collaboration to foster entrepreneurship. This agreement combined EBAN’s pan-European network of early-stage investors with EIT Digital’s vast deep tech ecosystem. Through this partnership, EBAN and EIT Digital teamed up to identify the top talent and innovators, and to provide them with the combined resources they’ll need to turn their top tech into companies that are the engine of the European economy.

Two new thought leadership reports were published in our Makers and Shapers series in 2023, adding the total number of reports to 7 at the end of the year. The ‘Balancing Act Between FinTech Innovation and Regulation’ provides an in-depth analysis of the growth and evolution of the FinTech industry in Europe over the past five years, and the challenges regulators face in fostering innovation while managing emerging risks. The second report, ‘The EU-US Tech Relationship in a Changing Global Economic Order’ focuses on four scenarios that look at the degree of regulatory alignment and, the industry collaboration.

In the Makers and Shapers Conversations video series, two new videos were published in 2023, the first with Plug and Play Managing Partner, Seena Amidi on how to build a stronger European deep tech ecosystem, and the second with Michiel Scheffer, the President of the Board of EIC, on deep tech investments in Europe and EIC’s role. Combined the 30 videos published in the series have received almost 1.7 million views.