2. Rationale and Union added value

If Europe is to compete on an international scale, these structural weaknesses need to be overcome. The elements identified above are common across Member States and affect the Union's innovation capacity as a whole. The EIT will address these issues by promoting structural changes in the European innovation landscape. It will do so by fostering the integration of higher education, research and innovation of the highest standards, notably through its Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs), thereby creating new environments conducive to innovation, and by promoting and supporting a new generation of entrepreneurial people and by stimulating the creation of innovative spin-offs and start-ups. In doing so, the EIT will contribute fully to the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy and notably to the flagship initiatives 'Innovation Union' and 'Youth on the Move'. In addition, the EIT and its KICs should seek synergies and interaction across the priorities of Horizon 2020 and with other relevant initiatives. In particular, the EIT will contribute through the KICs to the specific objectives of the priority "Societal challenges" and to the specific objective "Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies". The specific feature of the EIT is to integrate higher education and entrepreneurship with research and innovation as links in a single innovation chain across the Union and beyond, which should lead, inter alia, to an increase of innovative services, products and processes brought to the market. The EIT, through its KICs, operates in line with business logic and takes a results-oriented approach. Strong leadership is a pre-requisite: each KIC is driven by a CEO. KIC partners are represented by single legal entities to allow more streamlined decision-making. KICs must produce clearly defined annual business plans, setting out a multiannual strategy and including an ambitious portfolio of activities from education to business creation, with clear targets and deliverables, looking for both market and societal impact. The current rules concerning participation, evaluation and monitoring of KICs allow fast-track, business-like decisions. Business and entrepreneurs should have a strong role in driving activities in KICs, and the KICs should be able to mobilize investment and long-term commitment from the business sector. The EIT KICs are highly integrated ventures, bringing together partners from industry including SMEs, higher education, research and technology institutes, renowned for their excellence, in an open, accountable and transparent manner. KICs allow partners from across the Union and beyond to unite in new, cross-border configurations, optimise existing resources and open up access to new business opportunities through new value chains, addressing higher-risk, larger-scale challenges. KICs are open to participation of new entrants bringing added value to the partnership, including SMEs. Talent is a key ingredient of innovation. The EIT nurtures people and interactions between them, by putting students, researchers and entrepreneurs at the centre of its innovation model. The EIT will provide an entrepreneurial and creative culture and cross-disciplinary education to talented people, through EIT-labelled Masters and PhD degrees, intended to emerge as an internationally recognised brand of excellence. In doing so, the EIT strongly promotes mobility and training within the knowledge triangle.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-03 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.