The Innovation Radar is a data-driven methodology and tool that aims to look into the innovation aspects within EU-funded research and innovation projects by identifying their innovations, the key innovator organisation developing any given innovation and the market readiness of an innovation.

Innovation Radar does not yet provide insights about innovations in all themes of Horizon 2020. It does provide insights from the following themes / areas of Horizon 2020: Digital, FET, Space, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Energy, SME Instrument, EIC pilot, Flagships (Graphene), Raw Materials, Bio Economy

No. It also provides to intelligence about innovations funded under FP7 and the CIP programme.

The Innovation Radar assessement is based on structured information captured via a questionnaire. The questionnaire is filled in by an independent innovation expert contracted by the European Commission. The consortium also contributes to fill in the questionnaire. After a thorough analysis of the project outcomes deliverables and results, the expert identifies the innovations (technology, product, service, methodology) emerging from the project . All required information about these innovations and their market readiness is captured during an interview with consortium representatives usually during a review meeting. This structured information is then automatically analysed via a methodology developed be the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

The Deep Tech category includes innovations funded by the EU in the following areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data, Internet of Things, Sensors, Robotics, New materials and nanotech, Biotech and Augmented / Virtual Reality. These are technological areas included in the “Deep Tech” definition outlined in the Hello Tomorrow and BCG report on Deep Tech.

The user can type one or more keywords in the “search” field to reveal innovations of relevance. Some additional filters (e.g. the level of maturity, the topic, “go-to-market” needs or organisation type) can also be added. The results will be displayed on both a map and in a list form. The user can drill down into more details for each innovation and to discover links to additional sources of relevance (e.g. more details on CORDIS) of the EU-funded project that is developing the innovation.

The methodology behind the Innovation Radar innovation was originally described in a report by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre published in July 2015.

Maturity of Innovations:

In order to provide some insight about market readiness every innovation featured in Innovation Radar is assigned to one of the following four maturity categories:

Market ready:

Innovations that are technologically mature and show high commitment of the project consortium to bring them to the market. They are considered ‘Ready for the market’ (about 10% of all innovations)

Tech ready:

Innovations that are progressing on the technology development process (e.g. pilots, prototypes, demonstration). Further action in terms concrete market-oriented actions (e.g. market studies, business plans, end-user engagement) are required to capitalise on the market potential of these innovations (about 20% of all innovations).

Business ready:

Innovations for which concrete market-oriented ideas have been put together (e.g. market studies, business plans, end-user engagement). They are considered advanced on market preparation but further progress on technology development is required (about 20% of all innovations are in this category).

Exploring:

Innovations that are actively explore value creation opportunities. These innovations are in the early phases of technological readiness, but already show high commitment levels from the organisations developing them. Their commercialisation requires efforts in transforming technology into marketable products (about 50% of all innovations are in this category).

These maturity categories are automatically assigned to an innovation based on its score for the “Innovation Management” and “Innovation Readiness” indicators. See graph below.

More details on this are available in the “Identifying the maturity of innovations in EU-funded research and innovation projects” paper (published March 2018).

A visitor can get in contact with a specific innovator organisation by sending a direct message to them through the Participant Portal of the European Commission.For this purpose a “Contact this innovator” link is provided on the innovator organisation’s page on this Innovation Radar platform. Please note that to use this messaging service you will need to have an ‘EU Login’ account. EU Login is the European Commission's user authentication service and you can register for an EU Login account for free here.

The experts are selected by the EU institutions and agencies responsible for the management of the funding programmes. They are selected in light of their expertise and experience taking into account not only the domain the innovation belongs to but also the capacity of the expert to identify and assess the innovations and avoiding any conflict of interest. More information on the European Commission’s database of independent experts used for monitoring and reviewing Horizon 2020 activities is available here.

The 'Market Creation Potential’ Indicator (MCPI) is a novel, first-of-its-kind indicator system that automatically categorizes innovations in terms of disruptive potential. It builds on 5 signals from Innovation Radar data set and automatically assigns an MCPI level to an EU-funded innovation. The MCPI shows that 65% of innovations do not show Market Creation potential (which means they address existing markets or the needs of existing customers). However 35% of innovations analysed by Innovation Radar do show market creation potential. These innovations are then assigned to one of 5 levels of market creation potential (from ‘low’ to ‘very high’). In total about 14% of all EU-funded innovations show ‘high’ or ‘very high’ market creation potential. The MCPI was developed in 2020 by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (for more details see their June 2020 paper describing the MCPI).