EIC Board member calls for building capacity to stop failing projects

A European Innovation Council (EIC) Board member has said that the EU needs to be more able to stop research and innovation projects that are likely to fail.

Laurence Petit, EIC Board Member and Director for Innovation, Start-ups and Investments at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), said, on 03/06/2026: We need the courage and the capacity to stop projects and, therefore, to focus on the most promising ones."

She was speaking at the EIC Summit, which took place in Brussels on 03-04/06/2026, on a roundtable on "Supporting high-risk deep tech innovations from lab to market".

Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council (ERC), said the ERC started the innovation process by supporting many ideas and projects. However, innovation wasn't a simple assembly line where every input turned into a successful output. Most ideas didn't become final products or breakthroughs. "That’s what we mean by high risk, high gain," she said. The ERC and EIC supported many ideas at the outset, but not all of them were meant to make it to the end. "That's why we…