New third large-scale call for the EU Innovation Fund 

To deliver on the ambitions of RepowerEU, the European Commission invests €3 billion in the next Innovation Fund call. This is a doubling of the budget. The support is aimed at clean tech projects and shall boost large-scale projects in decarbonising Europe. In this the call adds additional support to break free from Russian gas. 

Covering four thematic areas, the call will fund: (1) general decarbonisation with €1 billion, (2) innovative electrification in industry and hydrogen with €1 billion, (3) clean tech manufacturing with €0.7 billion, and (4) mid-sized pilots with €0.3 billion. Read more about the four categories here. 

The call is open for Norwegian applicants, as well as EU member states and Iceland. Applicants can apply through this portal, and the evaluation results will come in the second quarter of 2023. Eventual signature and grant award will take place in the fourth quarter 2023. 

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The Norwegian Catapults in Brussel 

The 15th and 16th of November representatives from the Norwegian Catapults visited NorCore. The catapult centers are established and developed by the Norwegian Catapult Programme, which is a governmental scheme created to support innovative companies. The catapults provide technology infrastructure for innovation to industry actors in five sectors. Read about the five catapults here (in Norwegian). 

NorCore had a bilateral meeting with the catapults focusing on opportunities in Horizon Europe. With their infrastructure the catapults can be a beneficial partner for Norwegian and international stakeholders in Horizon projects.  

The catapults also participated in NorCore’s November network meeting, which covered the topic of technology infrastructure. At the meeting the catapults presented the Norwegian technology infrastructure to our network, and the Research Institutes of Sweden and SwissCore both presented the strategies in their respective countries. 

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Meeting with the Financial Mechanism Office 

In the middle of November, we arranged a bilateral meeting at our office with the Financial Mechanism Office (FMO). FMO is the secretariat of the EEA and Norway Grants, a scheme  focusing  on reducing social and economic disparities in Europe, as well as strengthening relations between the EEA-countries and 15 European beneficiary states. 

One of five priority sectors which constitutes the grants includes the programme areas, research, innovation (Business development, innovation and SMB) and education. To each of these respective fields the Research Council of Norway, Innovation Norway and the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills are Donor Programme Partners. In this capacity NorCore’s three home institutions advise on development and implementation of the scheme, and work with facilitating Norwegian participation in the EEA and Norway Grants projects, as well as in projects under Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe.  

The meeting agenda was to learn more about each other's activities and better see the connections between our fields of work. As the current mechanism is approaching it’s end and the work on planning the next is about to start, it is important to exchange lessons learned in the implementation so far.   

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Conference on higher education in Prague

NorCore attended the International conference on Strategy and Policy in higher education, organized by the Czech National Agency for International Education in Prague. The conference was an official event of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and brought experts from the field of internationalization in higher education together. 

A session on further strengthening of the synergies between higher education and research was organised by The Norwegian Directorate of Higher Education and Skills and the Czech National Agency for International Education and Research. The aim was to explore what synergies between education and research can be, what the prerequisites for them are and to highlight best practice both at project and policy levelsing.  

Mads Gravås (Councellor for Education at the Norwegian Mission to the EU), Vidar Pedersen (European Programmes Director at HK-dir), Thérèse Zhang (Deputy Director for Higher Education Policy, European University Association) and Ticiano Costa Jardao (Researcher, Czech Technical University in Prague) contributed to the session.  

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