Discover great EU-funded Innovations
Innovation Radar methodology
Innovation Radar aims to identify high-potential innovations and innovators. It is an important source of actionable intelligence on innovations emerging from research and innovation projects funded through European Union programmes.
Data underpinning the Innovation Radar stem from a survey developed by the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CONNECT) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission.This survey is conducted during periodic reviews of collaborative projects funded through European Union (framework) programmes like Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020.
4 maturity levels of innovations
To capture the different maturity levels of innovations towards commercialisation, four innovation categories have been created based on respective scores of the Innovation Management and Innovation Readiness Indicators:
  • Market Ready:
    This category includes innovations outperforming in innovation management and innovation readiness. These innovations are technologically mature and show high commitment of the project consortium to bring them to the market. They are considered ‘Ready for the market’.
  • Tech Ready:
    This category includes innovations progressing on technology development process (e.g. pilots, prototypes, demonstration). They are considered ‘Advanced on technology preparation’. In order to capitalise on the potential of these innovations, the management team needs to focus on transforming a novel technology or research results into a marketable product or service and to prepare its commercialisation.
  • Business ready:
    This category includes innovations for which concrete market-oriented ideas have been put together (e.g. market studies, business plans, end-user engagement). They are considered ‘Advanced on market preparation’. Their commercialisation depends on progressing on technology development.
  • Exploring:
    This category includes innovations, which actively explore value creation opportunities. They are considered ‘Getting things started’. These innovations are in the early phases of technological readiness, but already show high commitment levels from the organisations developing them. Their commercialisation requires efforts in transforming technology into marketable products. Alternatively, this category includes concrete market-oriented ideas, which depend on further progressing on technology development process.
Each category represents approximatively 50 percent (Exploring), 20 percent (Business ready), 20 percent (Tech Ready) and 10 percent (Market Ready) of the innovations.
Discover disruptive potential with the Market Creation Potential Indicator
The 'Market Creation Potential’ Indicator (MCPI) is a novel, first-of-its-kind indicator system that automatically categorizes innovations in terms of disruptive potential. It builds on 5 signals from Innovation Radar data set and automatically assigns an MCPI level to an EU-funded innovation. The MCPI shows that 65% of innovations do not show Market Creation potential (which means they address existing markets or the needs of existing customers). However 35% of innovations analysed by Innovation Radar do show market creation potential. These innovations are then assigned to one of 5 levels of market creation potential (from ‘low’ to ‘very high’). In total about 14% of all EU-funded innovations show ‘high’ or ‘very high’ market creation potential. The MCPI was developed in 2020 by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (for more details see their June 2020 paper describing the MCPI).
2 composite indicators to categorise innovations
Survey results are used to calculate two core indicators which are the basis for classification in 4 different maturity levels.
The first indicator is the Innovation Potential Indicator which aims to measure development towards commercialisation. The second is the Innovator Capacity Indicator which aims to capture the innovative capacity of the innovators behind these innovations .
As these indicators are used for information purposes and classification only, individual indicator data are not disclosed publicly. They do not indicate the overall performance of a project or consortium, and are not used to assess the use of resources in an EU-funded project. Innovations listed on this website are not ranked according to indicator scores.
Innovation Potential Indicator
The Innovation Potential Indicator encompasses three indicators that capture essential steps in the innovation development process:
  • Innovation Readiness:
    This indicator relates to the technical maturity of evolving innovations. It aims to define the development phase of innovations. It accounts for the steps undertaken to prepare them for commercialisation (e.g. prototyping, demonstration or testing activities or a feasibility study) and to secure their technological resources. Furthermore, this indicator takes into account the time to the potential commercialisation.
  • Innovation management:
    This indicator addresses the project consortium and its commitment to bring innovations to the market. It aims to measure the capability of management teams to transform novel technologies or research results into marketable products or services. To this purpose, this indicator includes, among others, clarifying the related ownership and IPR issues, preparing a business plan or market study, securing capital investment from public and private sources, or engaging potential end-users in the project.
  • Market potential:
    This indicator relates to the demand and supply side of innovations. Regarding the demand side, it concerns the prospective market conditions and the chances of successful commercialisation. It aims to assess how products or services satisfy a market sector and serve a potential customer base. With respect to the supply side, it aims to assess whether there are potential barriers (e.g. regulatory frameworks or existing IPR issues) which could weaken the commercial exploitation of innovations.
The Innovation Potential Indicator is created as an arithmetic aggregate of these three indicators.
Innovator Capacity Indicator
The Innovator Capacity Indicator encompasses two indicators that capture the capacity of innovators in conducting and delivering successful innovations:
  • Innovator’s ability:
    This indicator relates to the ability of organisations in developing innovations within the EC-funded activities. It accounts for the number of times organisations have been identified by the Innovation Radar as key innovators. It includes other factors such as reviewers’ opinions about innovators’ potential and independence in fulfilling the market potential of innovations.
  • Innovator’s environment::
    This indicator aims to capture the overall conditions in the project consortium which an innovator faces. It relates to the composition and activity of partner organisations, the performance of the project in terms of innovations, and the commitment of relevant partners to exploiting innovations. Moreover, it also takes into account the presence of organisations that are directly interested in exploiting the innovations. It is assumed that a positive environment will have positive knowledge spill-overs between innovators and their environments.
The Innovator Capacity Indicator is created as an arithmetic aggregate of these two indicators.
Further reading
Detailed description of the methodology: The methodology applied to gather this intelligence was originally described in a report by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre published in July 2015.