ChallengEIT: Novartis

In addition to a potential market expansion with Novartis and top-tier customised mentorship, by participating in the ChallengEIT, you will have access to Europe’s largest health innovation network and beyond, thanks to the global outreach of EIT Hub Israel.

The programme has a wide array of mentors and experts available to support participating start-ups based on your needs, assembled by Novartis, EIT Health InnoStars & EIT Hub Israel.

The process will be structured in such a way that every participating start-up receives 1:1 tailored mentoring based on its needs, from several of our mentors in different sectors & subjects.

To be eligible for the programme, you must give consent to sharing some basic information about your application with organisers, EIT Hub Israel and EIT Health InnoStars do not request any rights. Participants may not have to disclose underlying detailed data and results when they commit to publishing, patenting, or protecting their results or demonstrating concrete exploitation, i.e., plan a specific use of the results for commercial purposes.

However, the winning teams can enter the negotiation phase with Novartis, which may constitute a step towards exploitation. Still, concrete exploitation will have to be materialized through a written commitment by the entity.

If your start-up is from one of the Horizon Europe and Associated countries, you are eligible and encouraged to apply. Additionally, you have to own and/or be entitled to use the intellectual property of your innovation, and not be in the process of implementing a similar pilot programme.

A startup from UK is eligible for applying to the programme as well as receiving all the programme’s benefits, nonetheless, we can’t commit to a PoC in the UK. Startups will be introduced to the UK BIOME, which is part of the wide BIOME network and will be considered by them for further engagement.

Every chosen start-up is considered to be part of EIT Alumni once the programme ends. As alumni, you gain first access to EIT opportunities, events, network, grants, etc. Overall, you become part of a peer community in your domain and others, in which shared knowledge and discussion is encouraged and mutually beneficial.

The selected startups will go into a boot camp and receive mentorship from Novartis & EIT experts. Between 2-3 starts-ups will complete the boot camp, and afterwards will be selected and matched with a specific use case, and lastly, into a pilot. Expected timelines are Q1/2023.

As Novartis is looking to explore solutions to be piloted within their ecosystems, we are looking for startups with a mature developed product which has a validated PoC and has been piloted at least in 1 country already.

ChallengEIT is an end-to-end programme, in purpose to scout and test technological solutions based on pre-defined business challenges utilising EIT’s global network and extensive innovation know-how. As part of the launch of the new Central Eastern European (CEE) & Israel BIOME, Novartis requested a challenge-based innovation programme to brand and attract start-ups, based on specific cluster challenges. Hence, the three bodies will work together in synchronization to find the requested start-ups, mentor them, and lead them to an eventual PoC.

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