Understanding and overcoming barriers to the scale-up of innovations supporting EU Missions

Expected Outcome

• The missions’ stakeholder communities are better aware of the diversity of risk perception and risk management strategies related to technological and non-technological innovations among them.
• European, national, regional and philanthropic funders can better address barriers (socio-technical, economic, cultural, and regulatory) to the achievement of mission objectives by strengthening stakeholder groups’ specific risk management strategies.
• Improved understanding and removal of barriers to scaling up innovative solutions relevant to EU Missions.

Scope:

This call aims to identify and address the barriers preventing the scaling and deployment of innovative technologies and non-technological innovations that support the five EU Missions in achieving their objectives. The analysis should notably consider how the risk perception and risk management strategies of diverse stakeholder groups affects the scalability of innovations in the context of EU Missions. By integrating insights from Social Sciences, and Humanities, projects will explore socio-technical, economic, cultural, and regulatory challenges to unlock the full potential of existing, performant but underutilised solutions.

This call invites research-led interdisciplinary consortia to investigate the barriers (socio-technical, economic, cultural, and regulatory) that impede the scaling of technological and non-technological solutions. The projects activities shall cover all five EU Missions.

Proposals should create a better understanding of socio-technical barriers based on investigations of risk perception and risk management related to technological and non-technological innovations. This shall include risk perception and risk management in regulatory and governance bodies, and the identification of socio-technical path dependencies in the context of missions. This shall include, without being limited by:

• Exemplary assessment of stakeholders perception of the social, economic, and environmental effects of innovations in missions settings.
• Exemplary assessment of examples of behavioural and systemic change as a result of shifting patterns of thought of risk and risk management and action, and experiment with new ways to drive transformation.
• Analyses of the role of experimentation (including by ‘culturally aware and emotional nudging’) to change risk perception and management as means of knowledge production and communication.

Projects should feed their insights to other EU mission projects, including those working on the topic “Advancing lead markets and proof-of-concept for deep tech solutions contributing to EU Missions.”