The European Capital of Innovation Award HORIZON-EIC-2026-PRIZE-ICAPITAL

The European Capital of Innovation Award Rising Innovator Category HORIZON-EIC-2026-PRIZE-ICAPITAL General conditions 1. Admissibility conditions: Proposal page limit and layout Applications must be submitted before 4 August 2026 – 17:00:00 CET (Brussels). Applications must be submitted electronically via the Funding & Tenders Portal Electronic Submission System (accessible via the Topic page in the Search Funding & Tenders section). Paper submissions are NOT possible. Applications (including annexes and supporting documents) must be submitted using the forms provided inside the Submission System ( NOT the documents available on the Topic page — they are only for information). Applications must be complete and contain all the requested information and all required annexes and supporting documents: Application form Part A — contains administrative information about the applicant organisations (to be filled in directly online) Application form Part B — contains the technical description of the application (to be downloaded from the Portal Submission System, completed and then assembled and re-uploaded as PDF in the system) Mandatory annex (to be uploaded as PDF file): Each application must contain a specific endorsement to apply, signed by the city Mayor (or the equivalent highest political representative) of maximum 2 pages. The required level of representation has to be respected. Your application must be readable, accessible, printable. Applications are limited to maximum 30 pages (Part B). Evaluators will not consider any additional pages. You may be asked at a later stage for further documents (for legal entity validation, bank account validation, ethics review, declaration of honour, etc). For more information about the submission process (including IT aspects), consult the Online Manual. 2. Eligible participants The candidate towns and cities must be located in one of the EU Member In order to be eligible, the applicant has to be a city[1] and must comply with the following criteria: The candidate cities must be located in one of the EU Member States or Associated Countries to Horizon Europe. For the category of European Capital of Innovation, the candidate city must have a minimum population of 250 000 inhabitants. In countries where there are no such cities, the city coming closest to 250 000 inhabitants is eligible to apply for the European Capital of Innovation category, provided that it has a minimum population of 50 000 inhabitants and that the city is not applying at the same time for the European Rising Innovative City category. For the category European Rising Innovative City, the candidate city must have a population comprised between 50 000 and 249 999 inhabitants[2]. In countries where there are no such cities, the largest city by number of inhabitants is eligible. [1] A city is a Local Administrative Unit or a group of Local Administrative Units where a majority of the population lives in an urban centre of at least 50 000 inhabitants. Local Administrative Units and their respective population figures should be those set out in the latest available validated or partially validated LAU correspondence table published by Eurostat (Local administrative units (LAU) - Eurostat (europa.eu)) at the time of the submission of the application. Local authorities may represent one city defined as a Local Administrative Unit, or a “greater city” or Metropolitan region, taking account of Functional Urban Areas when relevant. Legal entities with separate legal personality from cities, even if founded and funded by the cities, are not eligible to apply. [2] For population data in both categories, Eurostat will be the source of reference. For countries not covered by Eurostat, the Agency will perform specific checks when assessing the eligibility criteria, and might ask any concerned cities to prove they comply with this requirement. 3. Other Eligibility Conditions Winners of former European Capital of Innovation Awards editions, as well as runners-up of the edition 2026 are not eligible. This does not apply to previous finalist cities. Applicants that have already received an EU or Euratom prize cannot receive a second prize for the same activities. Joint applications by a group of applicants are not accepted and will be rejected as ineligible. 4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion Described in Article 7 of the rules of contest and in Annex C of the Work Programme General Annexes. 5a. Evaluation and award: Award criteria, scoring and thresholds If admissible and eligible, the applications will be evaluated and ranked against the following award criteria: award criterion 1: Experimenting – innovative concepts, processes, tools, and governance models proving the city