About funding of Seal of Excellence projects
The Seal of Excellence award is an initiative of the European Commission to help finance excellent innovative projects that could not be supported in any of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme instruments due to lack of funds.
Its essence is to award a “quality certificate” to projects that have exceeded the eligibility threshold for funding, have been qualitatively evaluated at an international level, but have not been funded, and this is only due to insufficient EC budget. Thanks to the certificate (which is a guarantee of project quality), it should be easier for companies to find funding at the national or regional level, with the project no longer being re-evaluated.
TA CR has supported projects of Czech Seal of Excellence (SoE) awardees at the national level. Previously, these were projects from the SME Instrument of Phase 1 of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, currently these are projects from the EIC Accelerator of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. Since 2017, TA CR has supported 27 projects with this award.
About EIC Accelerator
The EIC Accelerator is a European funding program under the European Innovation Council (piloted under the previous Horizon 2020 Programme, 2019-2020) that supports innovative start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It provides financial support (grants and equity investments) and business acceleration services to help companies develop and scale breakthrough technologies and innovations with high market potential. The program mainly targets high-risk, high-impact projects led by deep-tech companies and entrepreneurs aiming to create new markets or disrupt existing ones.