3 Ways to Boost Your EIC Pathfinder Proposal Strategy

The 2025 EIC – European Innovation Council Pathfinder Challenges are now open with a total budget of €120 million and the submission deadline of 29 October 2025. This year’s call focuses on four frontier topics that aim to push the limits of what’s scientifically and technologically possible:

1. 🌱 Biotech for climate-resilient crops & plant-based biomanufacturing
2. 🤖 Generative AI for medical diagnosis & cancer treatment
3. 🏗️ Robot collectives for autonomous construction
4. 🔄 Waste-to-value devices for circular fuel and chemical production

EIC Pathfinder isn’t just about bold ideas—it’s about building technology visions that can shape entire industries and ecosystems. And yet, many applicants underestimate one of the most strategic parts of the proposal: the Communication and Dissemination Work Package.
Here are 3 ways to make your communication plan an integral part of your innovation journey—not just a checkbox.

Communication = Alignment

🚫 Common Mistake: Treating communication as an isolated outreach activity.
✅ Strategic Fix: If you’re applying to a Challenge, your project will become part of a portfolio, guided by an EIC Programme Manager and expected to contribute to a shared roadmap. Your communication & dissemination work package should reflect that. Show how you’ll support joint dissemination efforts, amplify collective results, and stay responsive to the evolving goals of the portfolio.

2. Broaden your Audience

🚫 Common Mistake: Limiting dissemination to peer-reviewed publications or English-only materials.
✅ Strategic Fix: EIC Pathfinder encourages projects to communicate with diverse audiences—from policy and industry to civil society. Plan for multilingual content and multi-format storytelling—like infographics, explainer videos, or podcast clips. This increases visibility and makes your results more accessible and actionable beyond academia.

• Pre-production: Researching topics, coordinating with guests, writing scripts or outlines.
• Production: Recording interviews, collecting visual assets (logos, headshots, etc.).
• Distribution & Promotion: Uploading the episode, publishing it across platforms, and actively promoting it on LinkedIn, Twitter, email newsletters, and beyond.

3. Use Communication to Build Future Readiness

🚫 Common Mistake: Seeing communication as separate from the scientific goals of the project.
✅ Strategic Fix: Pathfinder projects are not required to move into application development—but many do. A strategic communication plan can spark early traction, create new partnerships, and position your project for future funding like EIC Transition. It’s not about overpromising—it’s about showing you’re thinking long-term.

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The Bottom Line

If you’re applying to an EIC Pathfinder Challenge, your communication plan isn’t filler—it’s part of your strategy for transformation. Evaluators want to see that you’ve thought not just about what you’re building, but how you’ll connect that work to the world.

Your science is innovative. Your communication plan should be too.

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