EU Prize for Women Innovators

The ninth edition of the EU Prize for Women Innovators closed on Thursday 18 August, with 277 applications submitted, higher than any previous edition. This prize is organised by the European Innovation Council (EIC) and funded under Horizon Europe to celebrate the women entrepreneurs behind Europe’s game-changing innovations, to inspire more women to follow their footsteps. The prize is open to women from all EU Member States and countries associated to Horizon Europe, who have founded an innovative company. This year the EIC awards three prizes of €100,000 each to the most inspiring women innovators and to mark the European Year of Youth, the EIC will be awarding a further three prizes of €50 000 to ‘Rising Innovators’ under the age of 35.

Previous winners have included female entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector. For example in 2021 Mathilde Jakobsen (Denmark), co-founder and CEO of Fresh.Land, won a prize for her digital platform that shortens and digitises the food supply chain, providing easy access to good quality food. See more information on previous winners here. 

The winners of the 2022 edition will be announced later this year. The prize releases a call every year, so keep following the progress. 

The EU Prize for Women Innovators is part of a series of EIC measures to empower women innovators and tackle systematic bias in research and innovation. Key initiatives including ambitious pitching targets for women-led companies under the EIC Accelerator, a new Women Leadership Programme supporting women entrepreneurs, a gender balanced EIC Board and integration of the gender dimension in the EIC Challenges. The new Women TechEU pilot complements these EIC initiatives, by supporting women-led deep tech startups at the early, riskiest stage of the company’s growth.