Call: Education and skills: empowering Europe’s young innovators

1. Excellent Science
2. Industrial Leadership
3. Societal Challenges

Reducing inequalities and social exclusion in Europe, overcoming the economic and financial crisis and tackling unemployment are crucial challenges for the future of Europe. At the same time, there is great potential for Europe through opportunities provided, for example, by new forms of innovation and by the engagement of citizens. Supporting inclusive, innovative and reflective societies is a prerequisite for a sustainable European integration.

The emergence of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), and therefore of a multipolar world, the ageing of the EU population and the need for more innovation call for a renewed understanding of this rapidly changing world. This understanding is supported by strong multidisciplinary approaches, including social sciences and humanities and information and communication technologies. European and national policies need to continue modernisation while acknowledging the socio-economic and cultural diversity in Europe, and improved knowledge about how our modern societies work.

EU research and innovation will address social exclusion, discriminations and various forms of inequalities. It will explore new forms of innovation and strengthen the evidence base for the Innovation Union, the European Research Area and other relevant EU policies. It will promote coherent and effective cooperation with third countries. Finally, it will address the issues of memories, identities, tolerance and cultural heritage.

The approach adopted in the present calls is in line with the Horizon 2020 Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) cross-cutting issue, engaging multiple actors including society, integrating the gender and ethical dimensions, ensuring the access to research outcomes. Some Topics deal specifically with formal and informal (science) education.

Europe is facing the need to identify the obstacles to and to find untapped sources of growth and employment, renewing the legitimacy of public policy-making, especially through greater citizens’ involvement, and of delivering better public services for all.

These issues need to be understood and addressed (cf. stronger evidence-base) in order for Europe to progress at socio-economic, political, educational and cultural levels, taking into account an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. An emerging approach for tackling many of these issues is to encourage creativity and collaboration between various societal actors through co-creation. It is therefore proposed to focus on co-creation for growth and inclusion: engaging citizens, users, academia, social partners, public authorities, businesses including SMEs, creative sectors and social entrepreneurs in processes that span from identifying problems to delivering solutions.

Proposals are invited against the following topics:

• Education and skills: empowering Europe’s young innovators
• User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation
• Piloting demand-driven collaborative innovation models in Europe
• Applied co-creation to deliver public services
• Co-creation between public administrations: once-only principle
• Policy-development in the age of big data: data-driven policy-making, policy-modelling and policy-implementation
• Towards a new growth strategy in Europe - Improved economic and social measurement, data and official statistics
• Better integration of evidence on the impact of research and innovation in policy making
• A European map of knowledge production and co-creation in support of research and innovation for societal challenges

Creativity, entrepreneurial skills, risk taking adaptability and innovation capacity, problem solving skills, skills related to effective teamwork and sharing information and knowledge, may all be key competitive advantages for Europeans, starting from young children. To make the best of this potential, it is essential that schools and educational institutions, as well as non-formal ways of learning, empower Europe’s young innovators with the skills they need from early on in life. Empowering the young through skills for innovation and entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, is particularly important to building more inclusive societies giving opportunities to all, including young innovators from less privileged backgrounds or those with disabilities in order to address inequalities.

The challenge to be addressed by this topic is to improve learning and teaching in innovation-related skills for young boys and girls at the age of primary and secondary education through the design and piloting of new innovative ways of skills education, including technologies, processes and relations.

Depending on the activity under this call, the general rule is that the required number of partners is between one and three legal entities each of which is established in a different EU Member State or Horizon2020 associated country.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU in the order of 2.5 million € would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. This does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts. Funding rate: 70% (except for non-profit legal entities, where a rate of 100% applies)

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