The European Capital of Innovation Awards (iCapital)
Scope and expected outcomes
Scope:
Cities are faced with most severe societal and sustainability challenges but do also have the means to develop, promote, and apply effective innovative solutions. They are the place where ideas, people, public and private actors meet and engage to improve the quality of life of citizens. They are the natural playground where breakthrough innovations flourish and nourish. They provide ground to experiment new technologies and products in a real environment, their interaction with people and their added value.
Objectives and Scope
The traditional city innovation ecosystem is opening up to new models of innovation engaging citizens, ensuring their involvement in the decision making process, and reinforcing democracy and rights. An increasing number of cities are acting as test beds for innovation and run people-driven initiatives to find solutions to societal challenges, such as climate change, digitalisation, sustainable growth or social cohesion, including through new endeavours such as nature-based solutions and EU Missions
The public domain is particularly challenged with finding effective ways to ensure the mainstreaming of these practices into the ordinary urban development process. Successful practices are particularly crucial to enhance the city’s capacity to attract and retain new resources, funds and talents to stimulate the growth of breakthrough innovations. Moreover, collaboration and strengthening synergies among innovation ecosystems boost cities’ development and resilience to tackle urban challenges and inspires many other cities follow a similar path.
The New European Innovation Agenda sets out a vision for harnessing the power of innovation to drive economic growth, social progress, and contribute to the green and digital transition in Europe. The agenda emphasizes the need for strategic investments in key technologies, including deep tech, and for strengthening and better connecting innovation ecosystems through stronger collaboration between regions, to close the innovation divide.
For this reason, the European Capital of Innovation Awards will recognize the cities’ role as catalysers of the local innovation ecosystem and will stimulate new activities aimed at boosting game-changing innovation.
Expected results
A European prize to the most innovative cities ecosystems. The award will raise the profile of the cities that have developed and implemented innovative policies; established frameworks that boost breakthrough innovation; enhanced the city attractiveness towards investors, industry, enterprises and talents; helped to open up connections and strengthen links with other cities, promoting the replication of best practices in the innovation field; enhanced citizens’ involvement in the decision-making process; and supported cities resilience.
Conditions
General conditions
1. Admissibility conditions:
Applications must be submitted before the 18 June 2024 (17:00:00).
Applications must be submitted electronically via the Funding & Tenders Portal Electronic Submission System. Paper submissions are not possible.
Applications (including annexes and supporting documents) must be submitted using the forms provided inside the Submission System (not the documents available on the Topic page — they are only for information).
Applications must be complete and contain all the requested information and all required annexes and supporting documents:
Application Form Part A — contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (to be filled in directly online)
Application Form Part B —contains the technical description of the application (to be downloaded from the Portal Submission System, completed and then assembled and re-uploaded as PDF in the system)
- mandatory annex (to be uploaded as PDF file):
- Each application must contain a specific endorsement to apply, signed by the city Mayor (or the equivalent highest political representative) of maximum 2 pages. The required level of representation has to be respected.
Your application must be readable, accessible,printable.
You may be asked at a later stage for further documents (for legal entity validation, bank account validation, ethics review, declaration of honour, etc).
Proposal page limits and layout: applications are limited to 30 pages (Part B). Evaluators will not consider any additional pages.
2. Eligible countries: in order to be eligible, the applicant has to be a city or a town, and must comply with the following criteria:
For the category of European Capital of Innovation, the candidate city must have a minimum population of 250 000 inhabitants. In countries where there are no such cities, the city coming closest to 250 000 inhabitants is eligible to apply for the European Capital of Innovation category, provided that it has a minimum population of 50 000 inhabitants and that the city did not apply for the European Rising Innovative City category.
The candidate towns and cities for the European Rising Innovative City category must have a population of 50 000 and up to 249 999 inhabitants.
3. Other eligibility conditions:
Winners of former European Capital of Innovation Awards editions, as well as runners-up of the edition 2023 are not eligible. This does not apply to previous finalist cities.
Applicants that have already received an EU or Euratom prize cannot receive a second prize for the same activities.
Geographic location: applications must relate to activities in an EU Member State or an Associated Country to Horizon Europe.
4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion: described in article 7 of the rules of contest and on Annex C of the Work Programme General Annexes
5. Evaluation and award:
Award criteria, scoring and thresholds. If admissible and eligible, the applications will be evaluated and ranked against the following award criteria:
- award criterion 1: Experimenting – innovative concepts, processes, tools, and governance models proving the city's commitment to act as a test-bed for innovative practices, while ensuring the mainstreaming of these practices into the ordinary urban development process.
- award criterion 2: Escalating – promoting the acceleration of the different actors of the local innovation ecosystem, supporting growth of highly innovative start-ups and SMEs, establishing innovation friendly legal framework, creating an environment that stimulates growth and attracts private and public investments, resources, diversity and talents; and driving innovation demand through efficient innovation public procurement.
- award criterion 3: Ecosystem building – unlocking cities’ potential as local innovation ecosystem facilitators by fostering synergies among different innovation ecosystem players, from public, industry, startups, civil society, citizens to academia, to contribute to the development of an innovation ecosystem within the city.
- award criterion 4: Expanding – acting as a role model for other cities by supporting the dissemination and replication of tested solutions that boost the local innovation ecosystem; by promoting mutual learning, knowledge transfer and capacity building; and by enhancing cooperation and synergies between cities that are front-runners in driving the local innovation ecosystem, and those that are still exploring and testing their role as innovation enablers.
- award criterion 5:City innovative vision – applicants should demonstrate their long-term strategic vision/plan, highlighting the innovativeinitiatives that have positively contributed to the transformation of the city and which will further support the development of a sustainable and resilient innovation ecosystem ensuring the green and digital transitions.
- award criterion 6:Citizens’ rights – the use of innovation to strengthen democracy, to protect citizens' rights, to foster social cohesion, and ensure integration with a special view on minorities, gender, disability, or race.
Maximum points: 60 points.
Individual thresholds: 6/10 points.
Overall threshold: 36 points.
Applications must pass both all the individual thresholds and the overall threshold. The prize will be awarded to the applications ranked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd with the best scores in each category. Other applications will be rejected.
Submission and evaluation processes.
Applications will be subject to a formal evaluation by a jury in each category.
If there are more than 60 applications in one category, there will be a pre-selection phase in that category to select the best 60 applications to pass to the jury review. Otherwise, all eligible applications will pass directly to jury review.
The pre-selection panel/jury will evaluate each application against the award criteria.
For applications with the same score, the pre-selection panel/jury will determine a priority order according to the following approach: the score for the criterion No 5 will be given a weight of 2 and the score for criterion No 2 will be given a weight of 1.5. If two or more applications still tie for any rank or category, the prize will be equally divided and awarded to all applications with the same score.
The 6 best ranked applications in each category will be invited for a hearing with the jury in Brussels. This hearing may take place remotely.
On the basis of the evaluation by the jury (and after the mandatory checks: ethics review, security scrutiny, legal entity validation, non-exclusion, double funding and plagiarism, etc), the awarding authority will decide on the award of the prize.
Indicative timeline for evaluation and publication of results.
The call is open until 18 June 2024 (17:00:00). The jury members will evaluate the proposals received between July and September. The hearings will take place in September - October. Information on the evaluation results / award will take place in November - December 2024.
6. Legal and financial set-up of the grants: described in Annex G of the Work Programme General Annexes
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