Unlocking Europe's Full Potential: Positive Signals from the European Innovation Scoreboard

28DIGITAL Is On The Ground Supporting Southern Europe's Innovation Catch-Up.

Every year, the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) draws the same picture: a cluster of Innovation Leaders in the north, and a wide band of Moderate and Emerging Innovators stretching from the Iberian Peninsula through Italy and Greece into Central and Eastern Europe. The gap between them has been remarkably persistent. But the 2026 edition of the EIS also tells a more encouraging story of countries in that middle band starting to close the distance. We at 28DIGITAL would like to believe we are contributing to this progress.

Italy is a case in point. Long parked in the EIS's Moderate Innovators group, it posted the second-largest year-on-year gain of any EU country (apart from Malta) in the 2026 edition — a +5.0-point jump that lifted it from 14th to 13th place in the EU ranking. Spain tells a similar story of quiet acceleration: its innovation performance has grown steadily, and its year-on-year momentum actually sped up between the two most recent editions, from +1.9 to +2.9 points, also moving it up a rank. Neither country has broken into the Strong Innovator tier yet. But both are trending the right way.

Greece presents a more nuanced case. While it remains among the lowest-ranked EU countries on the overall Summary Innovation Index, its SMEs are among the most innovative in Europe. Greece ranked 1st in the EU on "SMEs introducing product innovations" in 2025 and 3rd in 2026; on "SMEs introducing business process innovations," it ranked 1st and then 4th. The constraint, therefore, appears not to be entrepreneurial capability but the surrounding ecosystem: weak digital infrastructure, low venture capital penetration, and limited scale-up support.

28DIGITAL has built its strategy around precisely this observation: that innovation capacity in Moderate and Emerging Innovator countries is often already there, and what's missing is the connective tissue: funding, mentorship, corporate access, and a route to European markets - that turns capacity into performance. Therefore, the organisation has deliberately built out its presence across those countries to meet their needs and is running an open innovation ecosystem, where everyone benefits from the pull to innovate and grow.

The entry point into 28DIGITAL's pipeline is the Venture Incubation Program (VIP), a structured, two-stage competition that takes deep tech teams from early prototype to investment readiness. Teams start with an introductory bootcamp, move through a 12-week incubation programme combining mentoring and MVP validation, and finish at a Demo Day. Selected teams receive a €5,000 Growth Package; those who incorporate and validate a working MVP can compete for a further €25,000 Final Prize.

The alumni network across the three countries is telling. In Italy, BILLD — founded by two PhD students from the University of Naples Federico II — built a device replacing paper receipts with digital ones, targeting a genuinely absurd statistic: Italy prints 35 billion paper receipts a year, felling 1.4 million trees and generating 88,000 tonnes of CO₂ in the process. In Greece, SciDrones, a University of the Aegean spin-off, used its VIP grant to develop AI-driven coastal litter mapping technology, later winning the CASSINI Prize for Digital Space Applications and securing nearly €1 million to scale its platform. A second VIP alumnus, Ozzie Robotics, took the programme in a different direction entirely: the company builds the software and hardware behind autonomous robots capable of providing social care and school assistant services, with 28DIGITAL backing its development under a 2020 Venture Program project.

In Spain, Madrid-based Converflow.ai used the programme to validate an AI communication platform for the education sector, running paid pilots that converted directly into go-to-market traction. Mential Health Technologies, launched under a 2023 Venture Program project, is building a digital platform offering online diagnosis and 16-week psychological support programmes for women, addressing conditions such as endometriosis, menopause and hypothyroidism that are chronically underserved in mainstream care.

Once a venture has validated its model, 28DIGITAL's Open Innovation Factory — recently relaunched as the Co-Creation Accelerator — becomes the next stage: a curated matching platform connecting startups and SMEs with corporate partners, EU-funded pilots, and investment calls. The new Co-Creation Accelerator format is explicit about who it's for: micro and small enterprises with fewer than 50 employees, matched to real industry challenges through either an Open Challenge track (bring your own corporate partner) or an Industry Challenge track (apply to a predefined one).

This is, almost precisely, the missing piece for the kind of SME innovation activity the EIS data shows Greece already has in abundance; a mechanism for translating high product- and process-innovation rates into the corporate partnerships and follow-on funding that let a small business actually scale. Greek retail-and-airport analytics startup Ariadne is one Open Innovation Factory success story; in Italy, digital health startup VoiceMed (breath-and-voice diagnostics) and YouAddict (an AI stylist platform that relocated to Bolzano's NOI Techpark and is now exploring expansion into Spain) both moved through the same funnel. Spain has its own example in Clevergy, founded in 2021 to help energy retailers and installers manage customer relationships and advise on energy needs. 28DIGITAL backed Clevergy's platform under a 2022 Open Innovation Factory project, and the company went on to raise €1.5 million in external funding.

None of this works without deep local roots, and 28DIGITAL has built them differently in each country. In Italy, where 28DIGITAL can count on three offices: in Milan, Trento and Bolzano — it co-runs two initiatives that are part of the EU Digital Innovation Hubs network, and xcarry the European Commission's Seal of Excellence: M.I.A. Lombardia, a 12-partner manufacturing-digitalisation consortium that has already brought 120 Lombard SMEs into its programmes on €5.8 million of PNRR funding, and DIPS in Trento, focused on AI and cybersecurity for public administrations, coordinated with Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the University of Trento. Corporate ties run through TIM, Intesa Sanpaolo and STMicroelectronics.

In Greece, the Athens office anchors a fast-growing ecosystem, reinforced by a new Memorandum of Understanding with the Hellenic Centre for Defence Innovation to accelerate dual-use technology development, and by co-authored annual reports with Found.ation and the Hellenic Development Bank of Investments tracking Greek startup investment (which grew 35% year-on-year in the most recent report). In Spain, the Madrid office operates as a legally independent Spanish foundation, co-financed by the Community of Madrid and EU regional development funds, with corporate and academic ties to INDRA and the University of Barcelona, and active hub relationships spanning Madrid, Valencia and Navarra.

The furthest upstream part of the pipeline is talent. The EIT Digital Master School — delivered through partner universities including Politecnico di Milano, the University of Trento, and others across the network — has grown from 14 to 24 partner universities between 2022 and 2025, with more joining in 2026. Summer Schools run each year in Italy, Greece and Spain, including a Digital Wellbeing track in Barcelona and a FinTech track in Madrid, giving students an early, hands-on entry point into the ecosystem well before they become founders. It's not an abstract pipeline: the co-founders of Italy's BILLD met as PhD students at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, turning a degree programme into the earliest possible stage of company formation.

LEVELS is an even more direct case: its four co-founders met as students in the Master School's double degree in Data Science between Politecnico di Milano and KTH, and went on to found a GenAI SaaS platform automating safety compliance and procurement documentation for the construction sector, reaching over €160,000 in ARR and 16 customers within months of launch. It is, in effect, the Master School's talent pipeline converting directly into a functioning company.

Spain shows what this looks like at scale. 28DIGITAL runs four Master School programmes there in partnership with the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM): Data Science, Emotion Artificial Intelligence, Fintech, and Human-Computer Interaction and Design. Since the partnership began, around 500 students have come through these programmes — a large enough cohort that it functions as a standing pipeline of STEM graduates feeding directly into Spain's digital innovation ecosystem.

Put together, the four pillars — VIP, the Co-Creation Accelerator, university and corporate partnerships, and STEM talent development — form a single funnel: students become founders through the Master School and Summer Schools, founders become ventures through the VIP, ventures become scale-ups through the Co-Creation Accelerator, and the strongest performers graduate into 28DIGITAL's own equity portfolio, which the organisation aims to grow by 50 new early-stage startups a year through 2030.

That funnel doesn't show up directly in any single line of the European Innovation Scoreboard. But it maps closely onto exactly what the data says is needed.

Italy’s digitalisation surge, Spain’s broadening momentum, and Greece’s untapped SME innovation strength are different versions of the same underlying deficit: real innovation capacity exists in Europe’s Moderate Innovator countries, but it lacks the infrastructure to convert into performance. 28DIGITAL has structured its operations to supply precisely that infrastructure—and the early evidence suggests the model is helping to close the gap.