Innovation in paediatric health is critical to ensure that children, regardless of their age, health condition, socio-economic situation or place of birth, have access to the life-changing healthcare solutions they need to grow-up stronger and contribute to a better society. Children are not just small adults and they need targeted innovative solutions. However, paediatric innovation is still elusive. There are two main causes for this: i) Stakeholders perceive paediatric innovation as risky and they just try to adapt adult solutions to children. ii) Paediatric experts, innovators and other relevant stakeholders are scattered in a fragmented ecosystem across Europe failing to identify opportunities or deliver effective and harmonized action. Thus, the unexploited innovation potential is large, particularly in emerging and moderate innovator countries. To reduce barriers and exploit these opportunities, while ensuring equality across different countries, the establishment of a European Paediatric Innovation Ecosystem is of paramount importance. The i4KIDS-EUROPE project builds on an existing successful initiative (i4KIDS), and it will expand its activities towards Europe in order to enlarge the participation of diverse European paediatric stakeholders and territories. The project will allow synergies, avoid duplications, reduce differences between strong and emerging/moderate innovator territories and strengthen competitiveness to optimise the innovation potential of the European paediatric sector. To achieve this, we will analyse the landscape of paediatric innovation in Europe as well as the barriers that emerging/moderate innovator countries face. i4KIDS-EUROPE will offer an interconnected paediatric innovation ecosystem that will capacitate its underrepresented actors and make them participate in the design of the future European Paediatric Innovation Ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is crucial for economic growth and societal progress, yet women remain underrepresented in the field, accounting for less than a third of entrepreneurs in EU. This under-representation not only highlights inequality but also limits EU's potential to tackle pressing challenges, such as the digital, green, resilience transition, and recovery from the pandemic. Deep tech sectors are even less balanced, and investment for women-led companies remains less than 2% of the total To address this gender gap, Women TechEU will bridge collaboration between the European Commission and pan-European deep tech women-led startups to create a more gender-balanced entrepreneurship ecosystem. Built on the exisisting foundations of the EIC Women TechEU initiative, our consortium will scale this iniatiative with a clear perspective towards long-term sustainability We will invest 12M€ in equity-free grants to 160 women-led deep tech companies and additional support services in a programme enhancing current EIC BAS to which we will link The consortium is comprised by partners covering all the expertise and geographies needed to reach over 15000 women entrepreneurs in deep tech from all over Europe. Led by EIT Manufacturing, it is strengthened with the participation of other KICs from EIT like Health, Food and Climate, leveraging the power of their network and landmark events. We also count with the expertise from Sploro in cascade funding programmes. Across Limits will guide the communication and dissemination activities as well as link in the service delivery with Awaken Hub, who will coordinate an effort to evaluate over 1500 experts in 4 different open calls. The consortium is complemented by major networks of investors and women entrepreneurs like EBAN, AFAEMME, or FI Values and purpose driven we will search for sustainability and major impact of the initiative during the project and beyond even proposing a PPP structure to further exploit the project results.