Gateway to European Digital Innovation

EIT Digital as a pan-European organisation with 350 partners and 23 offices across EU27 and a Hub in Silicon Valley is ideally suited for tapping into the expertise and know-how of different and diverse stakeholders across Europe and wider, both from the private and public sectors including corporates, academia and SMEs and acting as a gateway to the European Digital Innovation. 

In 2024 EIT Digital continued to expand its footprint in the European Digital landscape by opening new Regional Offices in Athens (Greece) and Bolzano (Italy). 

The European Digital industry’s demand for digital talent was served by the 235 entrepreneurial-minded digital domain masters who graduated from the EIT Digital Master School. The EIT Digital Professional School supported the industry in upskilling and maintaining its workforce's digital competencies by delivering 14 market-relevant online courses and operating a library of 46 self-paced online courses on Coursera. 

The European digital industry was injected with 44 new deep-tech digital ventures and market with 62 new deep-tech solutions delivered by the EIT Digital Open Innovation Factory and Venture Incubation programmes. 

In 2024, EIT Digital Growth Services supported 118 companies, out of which 35 for access to finance. Work done with and for the recently supported scaleups contributed to them securing over 74M€ of funding in 2024.

In 2024, EIT Digital continued implementing its strategy to strengthen its reputation and position as the leading EU multi-stakeholder collaboration platform for digital technologies mobilising and deploying private and public funding to address the top priorities on innovation and skills of the European Union. As part of this strategy, EIT Digital entered various European Commission (mostly Horizon Europe and Digital Europe Programme) calls and nationally funded collaboration projects and secured 20 of these projects either as the consortium coordinator or a member. 

The total funding from the awarded EU and national projects mobilized by EIT Digital for its partner network in 2024 was 120M€, thus proving that EIT Digital can leverage its 15 years of experience in managing EIT activities and grants by truly becoming a gateway to the European digital innovation for its partner network. 

In the Education and Skills domain, two EIT Digital lead projects SPECTRO and EMAI4EU enrolled their first student cohorts on EIT Digital Master School programmes (both ISCED Level 7, 120 ECTS): SPECTRO focuses on Cybersecurity and Robotics and EMAI4EU on Emotional Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the SME4DD project continued to deliver short-term training programmes for SMEs in three strategic digital technologies for Europe (Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity). 

In 2024, EIT Digital won several Innovation and Entrepreneurship domain projects, among them CURIUM working to transform Europe into a trustworthy certified Digital Valley, CERTAIN focusing on the AI-driven data operations and compliance technologies, and COcyber fostering coordination between cybersecurity civilian and defence spheres. 

In November 2024, the LLM-Bridge consortium with EIT Digital as one of its core members, submitted a proposal for the “Support to the Implementation of Multi-Country Projects (MCPs)” call. The project was awarded in February 2025. It will prepare and operationalise two of the so-called Draghi report‘s suggestions by creating a pan-EU Generative AI/Language Technology ecosystem and a catalyst/stage-gated challenge by exploiting and factoring in resources and assets made available by other initiatives. The programme is powered by European high-performance computers GENCI, GRNET, and LUMI. 

In the previous year’s won Innovation and Entrepreneurship domain projects AI Boost, CONSOLE, CUSTODES, CyberSecDome, Deploy AI, FINEST Scaleup, MANOLO, SPIDER and TANGO continued delivering their projects. 

In the ecosystem domain, the DigitalSkills4PreciseFarm project delivering a precision farming ecosystem for digital skills enhancement across Europe was awarded in 2024. The CyberHubs project building a European Network of Cybersecurity Skills Hubs started its operations in January 2024. 

For more details on EIT Digital European Union Collaborations, please visit the EU Collaborations page on our website. 

In 2024, we continued strengthening our connections with the European digital industry by actively participating and contributing to the work of the European Green Digital Coalition, the VR/AR Industrial Coalition and the AI, Data and Robotics Association (ADRA). These memberships not only brought us new delivery channels for our services but also opened access to impact the future European digital industry, technology and skills policy formulation. As an example of this, our CEO, acted as a member appointed by DG Connect of the European Multi-Stakeholder Platform on ICT standardization, advising European institutions on ICT standardization policies. 

The European Innovation Council (EIC) and EIT Digital continued their collaboration in 2024. Under this collaboration, we managed the over 15 thousand members -strong EIC Community Platform and offered our services on the online EIC Service Catalogue grouped in three toolkits. The EIT Digital Deephack -kit is a challenge service for companies and municipalities facing specific digital and data-related challenges. SPIN-kit offers a service portfolio of entrepreneurial education and pre-incubation programmes for researchers and scientists. The third, Talent-toolkit includes a service from education to venture creation and a service for job placement. In November, the two organisations jointly attended the Web Summit event in Lisbon by sharing a booth. 

EIT Digital was the first private organisation with a tailored offering to be featured on the European Union’s Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) platform launched in March 2024. We were also appointed as the main entry point for the fellow EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities. The platform managed by DG Budget supports European industry and boosts investment in critical technologies in Europe by raising and steering funding across 11 EU programmes. 

Two new thought leadership reports were published in our Makers and Shapers series in 2024, adding the total number of reports to 9 at the end of the year. Together with AINed (AI coalition for the Netherlands), we published in March 2024 the “Generative AI: Europe’s Quest for Regulation and Industry Leadership” -report. The report recommends Europe start co-create regulation based on learning by doing, adopt a mission-orientated approach at the EU level, develop new R&D tools as the traditional ones are too slow, target more the use of high-performance-computers to computer scientists and General-AI model developers as well as industry, and going beyond the Large-Language-Models (LLM). 

In December 2024 puhlished “Agritech: Digital Innovation for sustainable European agri-food sector” -report provides insights and suggestions on how the promises of digital farming can be realised and the challenges overcome by developing future scenarios. 

In the Makers and Shapers Conversations video series, two new videos were published in 2024. The first one was done with Margaritis Schinas, Vice-President of the European Commission on skills revolution, and the second one with Maria Metz, NTT Data Romania CEO, on the importance of collaborative leadership in the tech industry. Combined these two videos have received almost 700,000 views since their launch, and the entire series almost three million.