The European Innovation Council (EIC) aims to improve Europe’s ability to translate its world leading science to market and produce breakthrough technologies. It has a mix of bottom-up and targeted calls, and it zones in on specific fields, including health biotech, renewable energy and quantum, to try to make breakthroughs happen. This is key part of the job of ten EIC programme managers.

The job is modelled on the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) programme managers, who define an objective and then set goals, milestones and programme activities. 

“People talk about the DARPA model,” he says. “I feel quite confident that we have developed internally ourselves in the health biotech sector, the EIC portfolio model.”This model is based on the key idea of a shared component. That is, the projects are clustered based on their commonalities
and underlying technologies. For example, there is a cluster of EIC-funded projects and start-ups (outcome of EIC open Calls) working on applications of extracellular vesicles – naturally occurring particles that can be used to deliver drugs directly into cells, which met a month ago to find ways to collaborate. By clustering projects together, EIC wants to push innovation further, expanding the number of potential applications. This doesn’t mean the projects overlap in terms of their objectives,
but rather that they share common elements in terms of research and development of the base technology. The approach is working and generating more projects. The programme manager’s job is to help the innovators to take advantage of the knowledge that they share. “You're in the
same field, try to build something together that will be of mutual interest,” says Arzimanoglou. “What you can get from a portfolio is bigger than the sum of the individual projects in
terms of impact.”

From an initial cluster of seven to ten EIC projects and companies that Arzimanoglou calls the ‘nucleus’ the EIC hopes to bring critical mass to a specific innovation challenge.
To form the nucleus, EIC runs targeted calls. In last year’s call for start-ups, the challenge was in novel biomarker-based assays that could guide personalised cancer treatment. The EIC’s budget for the call was €65 million.

The programme managers set these priority areas by talking to people, keeping up with the trends in their scientific specialty and working in the field.
“The role of the EIC programme manager is to deal with the difficult cases of projects of high potential and not to interact with the individual projects,” says Arzimanoglou. “It is to think about groups of projects, portfolios or project areas, strategic autonomy, and be very up to date on current global trends in their fields.”

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