The European Innovation Procurement Awards (EUIPA) is open for applications

Every innovation needs early adopters before reaching widescale deployment on the market. Those early customers that purchase the development, testing and/or the deployment of innovative solutions, boost the process of transforming innovative ideas into market-ready solutions. 

The European Innovation Procurement Awards (EUIPA), supported by the European Innovation Council (EIC) under Horizon Europe, recognise public and private buyers, natural persons and those legal entities in their efforts to promote and stimulate innovation procurement. 

The Awards also aim to demonstrate how innovation procurement positively transforms the economy by not only creating new and sustainable markets, but also by tackling societal challenges such as climate change.

The contest will award six prizes, in total, across the following two categories:

• The Facing societal challenges category: focused on rewarding innovation procurement initiatives that help Europe in its transition to a Net Zero economy. 
• The Innovation procurement initiative category: open to innovation procurement initiatives that tackled any other challenge. 
• Both categories are open to projects that took place in any sector (e.g. health, transport, energy, environment, construction, security, education, manufacturing, ICT, etc.), and to different types of innovation procurement initiatives:
• Procurements of research and development
• Procurements of innovative solutions
• Initiatives that triggered several innovation procurements (e.g. innovation procurement strategies/ programmes/action plans).

Innovation can take many different forms such as product innovation, service innovation, process innovation, organisational innovation and marketing innovation. Innovative solutions can therefore cover not only new or significantly improved solutions, but also new or improved ways of combining or applying/using existing solutions.

Each of the two categories will reward one winner (ranked 1st) with EUR 75 000, one runner-up (ranked 2nd) with EUR 50 000, and one runner-up (ranked 3rd) with EUR 25 000. 

The winners and runners up will be determined based on the award criteria listed on the Awards’ page under the “Who should apply” section. 

The prize is open to any public and private buyers, natural persons, and legal entities supporting those practices located in one of the EU Member States or Associated Countries to Horizon Europe. The awarded procurement practice as well must have taken place in these countries.

The awarded procurement practice must relate to completed or ongoing initiatives started after 1 January 2019. Rules of contest describe in more detail the conditions and eligibility for participation. 

The contest is open for applications until 26 September 2024 (17:00 CET).

Click here to apply to the Facing societal challenges category or to the Innovation procurement initiative category.

More information here.

(by European Innovation Council)