What's Changing for EIC Grants in 2027?

The European Innovation Council is preparing a significant overhaul of two of its core grant schemes for 2027. Pathfinder and Transition are both set for structural changes that reshape how projects are evaluated, funded, and monitored once they're underway.

The detail comes from a second draft of the EIC Work Programme 2027, dated 7 July 2026. It's the final Work Programme under the current Horizon Europe cycle, and several of its changes are explicitly framed as pilots that will inform how the EIC operates under the next Framework Programme from 2028. If you're planning a EIC application, here's what's changing, why, and what it means for your project.

What's changing for EIC Pathfinder Open?

Pathfinder Open is moving from a single-stage application to a two-stage process, combining a short application with a full proposal for shortlisted applicants.

• Stage 1: You submit a short proposal covering the Excellence and Impact criteria, no more than 8 pages, plus commitment letters from each partner you plan to include in your consortium. Those letters aren't evaluated at this stage; they're used to prepare Stage 2. There's no fixed pass mark. Instead, the EIC ranks all Stage 1 proposals by score and sets the cut-off so that the total budget requested by invited proposals comes to roughly 2.5 times the funding actually available. The deadline is 25 February 2027.
• Stage 2: If you're invited forward, you submit a full proposal covering all three award criteria (Excellence, Impact, and Quality and Efficiency of Implementation), up to 23 pages, by 16 September 2027. Your consortium is expected to match the one set out in your Stage 1 commitment letters, though justified changes are allowed.
• Interviews: For the first time, Stage 2 includes an interview, held roughly 10 to 14 weeks after the deadline. You'll pitch your proposal in 10 minutes to the EIC Evaluation Committee, who then score you on individual evaluation, the interview, and their own consensus discussion.

The consortium requirement itself hasn't changed: you still need at least three independent legal entities, based in at least two different Member States or Associated Countries, with at least one established in a Member State. Funding is a lump sum grant covering 100% of eligible costs, and while the EIC treats requests of up to €4 million as the norm, you can ask for more if you can justify it.

How does Pathfinder Challenges differ?

Pathfinder Challenges, the thematic strand of the scheme, keeps a single-stage submission. There's no interview; proposals are assessed individually against the award criteria, then selected as a portfolio to build a balanced spread of projects across each Challenge's themes. The deadline is 29 September 2027, with proposals up to 30 pages.

Three Challenge topics are running for 2027:

• Advanced materials for future energy grids
• Safe and controlled continual learning for reliable AI agents (CLOWAI)
• Quantum energetics

If your project fits one of these predefined areas rather than the Open call, this year's Pathfinder changes largely pass you by.

What's changing for EIC Transition?

Transition sees the more far-reaching change. It becomes a single-beneficiary instrument, replacing the small-consortium approach that applied previously. You can apply as a start-up, SME, or research-performing organisation such as a university, but larger companies can't apply as the sole applicant. Former consortium partners, such as universities or research organisations from the originating project, can still be involved, just as affiliated entities, associated partners, or subcontractors rather than co-beneficiaries on the grant.

Alongside that, the application itself has new requirements:

• A video pitch of 3 to 5 minutes, submitted with your written proposal
• A letter of intent from at least one genuine potential customer or user, confirming no financial incentive was exchanged for the endorsement, which the EIC can verify at any stage
• A revised list of eligible feeder projects, meaning the earlier-stage grants your Transition proposal is allowed to build on

Funding sits between roughly €0.5 million and €2.5 million, for projects running 1 to 3 years, again as a 100% lump sum grant. The deadline is 16 September 2027, the same day as the Pathfinder Stage 2 deadline.

The most significant change is what happens after you're funded. Each project has to demonstrate, after its first year, that it has met the technological objectives and KPIs set out in its grant agreement. Where it hasn't, the project doesn't automatically continue. As the draft Work Programme puts it: "A decision to stop a project should be understood not as a failure of the project team, but as a normal and responsible consequence of supporting high-risk innovation."

On the evaluation side, proposals are first scored remotely and ranked, with a pool covering roughly 2 to 2.5 times the available budget invited to interview, held around 11 to 13 weeks after the deadline before a jury of up to six people. The EIC also builds in a gender-balance mechanism here: if fewer than 30% of the highest-ranked proposals invited to interview are women-led, further women-led proposals that clear the same Excellence threshold are added until that 30% target is reached, where possible.

What's changing for the EIC Accelerator?

The Pathfinder and Transition reforms are part of a wider set of changes across the EIC's 2027 Work Programme, and our grants team has been tracking the Accelerator side too. The three-step process stays the same, short proposal, full proposal, interview, but the calendar and reserve mechanics around it have been slightly reorganised.

• Short proposals can go in at any time. They're batched for evaluation on the first Tuesday of every month, and you'll hear back within roughly 4 to 6 weeks, scored by four expert evaluators against a GO/NO GO call. You need at least three GOs out of four to move forward.
• Full proposals go to one of four 2027 cut-offs: 3 February, 1 April, 1 September, or 3 November. Each proposal is reviewed by a technology expert, who runs an in-depth assessment including an online meeting with you, and an evaluation panel of at least three independent experts, who score and rank proposals within the batch.
• Interviews run three times a year. A GO wins funding. For the second interview session of the year specifically, the jury can also recommend a GO Reserve placement, meaning your proposal can still be funded later if extra budget frees up once all 2027 cut-offs have been allocated. Reserve list ranking is based on how many award criteria the jury scored as a GO, with the remote evaluation score used as the tiebreaker.

The submission limit hasn't changed, but it's worth restating because it catches companies out: since 1 January 2024, three unsuccessful submissions of the same or an improved proposal (at short or full proposal stage, under any funding type) rules you out of applying to the Accelerator again for the rest of Horizon Europe.

Why is the EIC making these changes?

The 2027 Work Programme is the final one under the current Horizon Europe cycle, and the EIC frames these reforms as building on implementation experience, advice from the EIC Board, and feedback from Member States. Several of the changes, including the Transition funding checkpoint, are explicitly positioned as pilots that will feed into the design of the EIC under the next Framework Programme from 2028, for which the European Commission has proposed a reinforced EIC with a bigger budget and more operational flexibility.

The philosophy behind the Transition checkpoint mirrors the "ARPA-style" approach the EIC is already piloting elsewhere in the 2027 Work Programme, through its separate Advanced Innovation Challenges scheme: accepting a higher failure rate in exchange for backing genuinely high-risk projects, now with an explicit off-ramp rather than funding continuing by default.

Are these changes final?

Not yet. Everything above comes from a second draft of the Work Programme, explicitly marked as not adopted or endorsed by the European Commission. It's circulated for feedback and comment, and the details, including the indicative budget figures, are still being finalised. Build in some flexibility if you're timing an application around these dates, in case the adopted version differs from the draft.

Key takeaways

• Pathfinder Open is going two-stage. An 8-page initial application, cut down to the top-ranked proposals, followed by a full application and, for the first time, an interview.
• Pathfinder Challenges is unaffected. Single-stage, portfolio-based, no interview, and running to a separate September deadline.
• Transition is closing to consortia. Single-beneficiary applicants only, with a video pitch, a letter of intent from a genuine prospective customer, and a year-one checkpoint that funding can now fail.
• None of this is confirmed yet. The Work Programme is still a draft awaiting formal Commission adoption, so treat the detail as a strong indication of direction rather than a locked-in rulebook.

If you're planning a Pathfinder or Transition application for 2027, or want an early read on how these changes affect your project's timeline and structure, contact Myriad to talk through your position.