Position Paper | Recommendations for the New European Innovation Agenda

The objective of the consultation was to gather input to fine-tune the New European Innovation Agenda in service of its ambitions: to address the scale-up financing gap, enable innovation in rapidly evolving fields, bridge the innovation divide between regions, and develop and attract talents.

EIT Food leveraged its accumulated expertise as an innovation partnership under Horizon Europe and as the largest agrifood innovation network in the EU, to advance the following recommendations:

1. It is not only necessary to create new solutions, but also to accelerate, scale up and make available existing solutions – including by reducing costs and regulatory barriers to their adoption
2. Access to finance remains a bottleneck for the EU’s innovation potential, especially in the agrifood sector. The underrepresentation of women, especially in leadership roles, further dampens the sector’s innovation capacity
3. Reducing regional disparities in agrifood innovation is key, but structural misalignments between EU instruments for regional development hamper the development and implementation of synergies between them
4. Education and training are a crucial enabler of agrifood innovation: there is a need to innovate curricula with more trans- and inter-disciplinarity, to ensure key underpinning capabilities

Read EIT Food’s full response by downloading the document below.