Journey Lead – Amsterdam; Berlin; Paris; Valencia; Bologna

EIT Climate-KIC is a knowledge and innovation community established in 2010 and funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union. Our purpose is to tackle climate change through innovation.

We are Europe’s largest public-private partnership with this purpose. At the heart of our endeavour is a pan-European community of innovators and changemakers eager to work on tough challenges, willing to engage in ambitious and unorthodox experiments, and committed to collective learning.

We bring together large and small companies, scientific institutions and universities, city authorities and other public bodies, start-ups, and students. With over 380 formal organisational partners from across 26 countries, we work together on innovation to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its unavoidable impacts. We are united by a commitment to direct the power of creativity and human ingenuity at climate change.

Our mission is to catalyse systemic change for climate action through innovation in areas of human activity that have a critical impact on greenhouse gas emissions – cities, lands, materials and finance – and to create climate-resilient communities. Our Theory of Change is focused on empowering people to change systems – through exploration, experimentation and demonstration – to enable viable alternatives at scale.

At the heart of our approach is ‘systems innovation as a service’ whereby we create a space for a portfolio of strategic innovation options and experiments, oriented around structural levers of change, designed with and for problem owners.

We act as a multi-sided platform, working across boundaries and across sectors, fostering innovation as a catalyst for transformation. We work together with problem owners, like city and regional governments, industry owners and directors, community organisations and policy makers, to orchestrate a portfolio approach to innovation interventions. We facilitate the creation of innovation consortia. We challenge and seek to enrich business model design. We offer tailored support for experimentation, implementation and scaling. We provide funding. We incubate very early stage ideation and pre-seed innovation with a view of contributing to systemic change. We place an emphasis 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.