TÜBİTAK is organising The 2026 EIC Pathfinder Challenges Info Day within the "Technical Assistance for Türkiye in Horizon Europe" Project, which is carried out under the Competitive Sectors Programme, implemented by the Ministry of Industry and Technology and co-financed by the European Union and the Republic of Türkiye. The session is a practical, half-day training delivered online.
The EIC Pathfinder funds the earliest stage of deep-tech research the point at which a technology exists as a scientific proposition rather than a product. Its Challenges strand differs from Pathfinder Open in a way that shapes everything about how a proposal should be written: proposals are not assessed one by one against a threshold and funded in rank order. The EIC assembles a coherent portfolio within each Challenge, and a proposal must visibly occupy a place in it. Excellent science that duplicates another excellent proposal loses. This is the single most common reason strong Turkish applications do not convert, and it is not something a Guide for Applicants makes obvious.
The three 2026 Challenges
Advanced Materials for Miniaturised Energy Harvesting Systems: energetically autonomous systems for applications such as point-of-care diagnostics and smart, sustainable cities, aligned with RePowerEU and the European Green Deal
Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing: biotechnology-based or pharmaceutical interventions that prevent, delay or reverse age-related disease, with personalised care through molecular profiling
DeepRAP: Deep Reasoning, Abstraction & Planning towards trustworthy Cognitive AI Systems: cognitive AI beyond pattern-matching, supporting the objectives of the AI Act and the European approach to artificial intelligence
A dedicated part of the session is given to these three Challenges: what each Programme Manager is actually looking for, where the scope boundaries sit, and how the portfolio categories work at the final evaluation panel, the point at which above-threshold proposals are separated from funded ones.
The session will cover the philosophy of the instrument: what the EIC means by a science-to-technology breakthrough, what it means for a project to have a vision, and how Pathfinder sits in relation to Transition, the Accelerator and the rest of Horizon Europe. From there it moves to the double scale of Technology and Business Readiness Levels, which governs not only how a project is described but how its work plan is built.
The next part of the session works through a real proposal section by section, led from the front rather than assigned as group work. Objectives and methodology, what transdisciplinary means for a Pathfinder consortium, open science beyond open access, gender mainstreaming, intellectual property over results, risk identification and presentation, and the impact section under a dual-scale logic. Working through an actual case makes visible what a template cannot: the difference between a section that satisfies a requirement and one that persuades an evaluator.
The final part addresses lump sum funding, which now applies across EIC Pathfinder and changes how budgets are built and defended. The mechanics, the working tools, and how the lump sum is carried into the project's work plan and managed once the project is running.
The next part of the session works through a real proposal section by section, led from the front rather than assigned as group work. Objectives and methodology, what transdisciplinary means for a Pathfinder consortium, open science beyond open access, gender mainstreaming, intellectual property over results, risk identification and presentation, and the impact section under a dual-scale logic. Working through an actual case makes visible what a template cannot: the difference between a section that satisfies a requirement and one that persuades an evaluator.
The final part addresses lump sum funding, which now applies across EIC Pathfinder and changes how budgets are built and defended. The mechanics, the working tools, and how the lump sum is carried into the project's work plan and managed once the project is running.
The session concludes with Success Stories from Türkiye: researcher who have been through this process and secured EIC funding, on what the proposal looked like at the point it stopped being a good idea and started being a fundable one.
The Info Day is designed for researchers in universities and research organisations working on breakthrough scientific results, for deep-tech start-ups and SMEs developing high-risk technologies, and for technology transfer offices moving laboratory results towards scale. It assumes no prior EIC experience, but it is most useful to those who already have a scientific result or a technological hypothesis in hand because the session is about turning that into a proposal, not about finding one.
The training will be delivered by Eva García Muntión, founder and director of RTDI and RTDI Innovation School, with over 25 years in the design and coordination of EC-funded collaborative R&D projects. RTDI has managed more than 325 R&I projects worth around €230 million, and its Innovation School has trained more than 2,300 researchers and innovators across Europe, Latin America, North Africa and Asia.
Participation is free of charge, but pre-registration is mandatory. Registered participants will receive the access link by email. Digital copies of all slides used during the session will be shared with attendees.
For registration: https://forms.gle/2tR8k549sRWQAbo88