Innovation & Entrepreneurship Head – Central and Eastern Europe

EIT Climate-KIC (Knowledge and Innovation Community) is the EU’s largest public-private partnership addressing climate change through innovation. Our community consists of over 300 leading partners from business, academia, the public sector and NGOs. Our purpose is to help create a prosperous, inclusive, climate resilient society founded on a circular, zero-carbon economy.

We focus on levers of systemic change, looking for where innovation is most needed to accelerate deep decarbonisation (elimination of fossil fuels and negative carbon) and effective adaptation. EIT Climate-KIC is predominantly grant-funded by the European Institute for Innovation and Technology, a body of the European Union and acts as a platform to work across boundaries and across sectors, fostering innovation as a catalyst for transformation. We:

• provide funding,
• facilitate the creation of innovation consortia,
• work together with our partners to take a portfolio approach to innovation options,
• challenge and seek to enrich business model design,
• offer tailored support for experimentation, implementation and scaling, and
• incubate very early stage ideation and pre-seed innovation.

To make ourselves accessible to key actors and ‘challenge owners’, we work along four priority themes: urban transitions, sustainable land use, sustainable production systems, and decision metrics and climate finance. In all four areas, we place an emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation design, on education as a driver of behavioural change through new skills and capabilities and on policy innovation. We run programmes for students, start-ups and innovators across Europe via centres in major cities and regions, convening a community of excellence in people and organisations.

We balance strategic innovation, aimed at renewing core business models, with a significant portfolio of bottom-up innovation – e.g. through our start-up accelerators – to learn, evaluate and continuously adjust our efforts to impact climate change. Ultimately, we aim to become a leader in systemic innovation that contributes to a paradigm shift from a linear, industrial production system to a circular, regenerative model, leveraging the power of our unique community of innovators and inspiring change beyond it.