Climate-KIC in the UK & Ireland

EIT UK & Ireland is a branch of a knowledge and innovation community established by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in 2010.

Our purpose is to tackle climate change through innovation. We are Europe’s largest public-private partnership with this purpose – a growing pan-European community of diverse organisations united by a commitment to direct the power of creativity and human ingenuity at the climate change challenge. We bring together large and small companies, financial investors, scientific institutions and universities, city authorities and other public bodies, start-ups, and students.

With more than 450 formal organisational partners from over 30 countries, we work on innovation to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its unavoidable impacts. Our mission is to catalyse systemic change through innovation in areas of human activity that have a critical impact on greenhouse gas emissions – cities, land use, materials and finance – and to create climate-resilient communities.

Our Theory of Change is focused on empowering people to change systems – through exploration, experimentation and demonstration – to enable viable alternatives at scale. Why? Our generation faces the challenge of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero within the next 20–30 years by changing almost every aspect of the ways humans currently live, work and play to avert catastrophic global temperature rise. Meeting that challenge requires transformation, by which we mean radical changes happening simultaneously, holistically and faster than we have ever experienced change before.

Deep Demonstrations

Our so-called “Deep Demonstrations” are the large-scale projects through which we offer our ‘systems innovation as a service’ model to help Europe’s most ambitious ‘challenge owners’ – i.e. the mayors, government ministries, industries and community leaders, and funders and investors who have the means and mandate to tackle Europe’s biggest climate change challenges – to deliver place-based or economic sector-based transformational change to meet climate targets. Since 2019, EIT Climate-KIC’s Deep Demonstration projects act as:

• a model for ‘how to deliver’ transformational change in places and economic sectors to meet ambitious climate targets through a just transition.
• sources of innovation and learning that can be shared to accelerate change elsewhere, working with public and private investors to scale impact.

Convening networks of expertise

We bring together partners in the worlds of business, investment, academia, and the public and non-profit sectors to create networks of expertise, through which innovative new products, services, markets and systems can be developed, and scaled-up for impact. Through our convening power, EIT Climate-KIC brings together the most effective groups to create the innovation that can lead to systemic change.

Leveraging grants smartly and effectively with private and public investment

We identify, source and place public and private funds that stimulate innovation. We track progress and outcomes and draw out learning and insight so that our funding and investment partners can effectively invest their resources for maximum impact. By bringing together those with vision, with ideas, with low-carbon products and services, and with finance, we generate the critical mass needed to tackle climate change.

Europe’s leading accelerator for cleantech startups

Since 2010 EIT Climate-KIC has supported over 1,800 climate-friendly startups throughout Europe. Successful companies such as Lilium aviation, Tado, Refurbed or Climeworks show the significance of green startups. Teams from the UK and Ireland have successfully managed to secure almost half a billion Euro of follow-on funding after our programmes. Find out more about the EIT Climate-KIC accelerator programme at climaccelerator.climate-kic.org.