Study location	Belgium, Leuven
Type	EIT Food Fellowships, full-time

Application fee	€600 per programme Programme fee: 600 EURO programme commitment fee including VAT (21%). This fee applies to the selected fellows invited to the programme. The selected fellows shall pay this fee within 15 days of receiving the invitation to participate.

Entry qualification

Postgraduate diploma (or higher) Innovator Fellowship accepts PhD, Post-Doctoral Fellows and Professionals. At the time of the application, Professionals must have a Master’s Certificate and at least two years of full-time equivalent research and innovation (R&I) experience. The entry qualification documents are accepted in the following languages: English. The application process is designed to demonstrate your educational level and your professional experience. If required EIT Food Innovator Fellowship team will ask for proof of your qualification.

Language requirements	English You must be able to work and communicate in English.

Overview

The EIT Food Innovator Fellowship Programme aims to empower talents to co-create, address, and gain experiences on excellent ideas capable of bringing their careers a step further and fostering innovators ready to respond to global food challenges.

Global challenges in the Agri-Food systems require a mind-shift and a thrilling change in the awareness and competencies of talents: the new generation of entrepreneurs is asked to play a key role in solving the planet’s food-related issues.

Talents from academia (Researchers) and non-academia (Professionals) are called to boost and diversify their career paths, solve global challenges, and enhance their career prospects.

Future Agri-Food systems leaders need a new set of competences beyond those acquired in research and academic environments. They require a proficiency that allows them to propose, manage, implement, and lead interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary research and innovation projects and to transform lab-ideas into business ideas.

This is why EIT Food has designed for you Innovator Fellowship, a career-boosting path for Researchers and Professionals.

EIT Food ecosystem is the perfect network to enhance your career prospect, offering further opportunities to develop your business idea.

Be creative and a leader in the Agri-Food systems and transform your lab-ideas into business ideas!

Programme fee: 495,87 + VAT (21%) Euro per fellow, which is 600 Euro per Fellow, including VAT. This fee applies to the selected fellows invited to the programme.
The selected fellows shall pay this fee within 15 days of receiving the invitation to participate.

Programme structure

After the evaluation based on scientific knowledge, skills and professional experiences, talents will be selected and invited to participate in the programme. The journey will start with a series of training sessions to build a community of game changers. The Innovator Fellowship talents will then progress through team formation, business idea development, and pitching sessions supported by mentoring. The journey will culminate with a final pitch event, where the new ventures will pitch their business proposition in the presence of a jury of innovative food system specialists.

The Innovator Fellowship journey will develop over six months. During these six months, you will be involved in about 10 – 12 days of training and one-on-one mentoring. The journey is designed to be compatible with fellows’ busy schedules based on an efficient and effective workload (see below).

The Innovator Fellowship programme consists of seven steps.

Step 1 – COMMUNITY & TEAM BUILDING – |ONLINE TRAINING| June 19th – 20th 2025 – 14:30 18:30 both days.

To move from individuals to a community and to perform teamwork, it is necessary to connect personally before making commitments, forming teams, and working together. People who complement, challenge, and support one another make great teams.
In the Community and Team-Building training, your values will be the chemistry and glue that forms a game-changer community. You will share common values and objectives and make informed choices about what powers the team to innovate.

In this step, the Innovator Fellowship connecting platform will be opened and introduced. This platform will be the starting point for team formation and ideation. Imagine it as a “Market Space” for sharing ideas and values and developing a team. You will be called to form a team of at least two people and start to identify a food sector problem/challenge. The “Market Space” will be organised around food system challenges (work tables), to which fellows will have access. Talents will gather around a common challenge, identify a problem they wish to tackle and create a team around a common idea.

Step2 – SYSTEM THINING & SDGs FOR THE FOOD SYSTEMS |ONLINE TRAINING| June 27th 2024 (14:30 – 18:30).

System Thinking and Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs) for Food Systems will allow you to acquire a system approach to problem-solving and critical thinking, which is later instrumental when deciding which problem to concentrate on and which agrifood challenge to solve. In addition, systemic approaches are much-desired to dissect the complexity of food systems and their subsystems, as revealed by the multitude of interconnections between the food ecosystem services. System thinking approaches support food systems’ sustainable transformation by shifting from linear thinking of producing-consuming-wasting to a holistic way of looking at resources and stakeholders involved. Methods and tools for the Food System approach will be transferred to you via interactive learning. A hands-on activity will allow you to design maps that explain parts of the food system’s complexity and communicate it to the other participants.

Step 3 – TOUCH AND GO WITH MENTORS |ONLINE Meeting| July 4th 2024 (15:30 – 17:30).

The former fellows consider mentoring one of the programme’s best training activities. We will provide high-level, one-on-one mentoring activities to help you shape your idea successfully. Step 3 begins by meeting the mentors and helping you identify the best pair mentor team. The Innovator Fellowship management will help to assign mentors to the teams. The pairing will be followed by structured mentoring to advance the team’s original project via a real working viability frame. Structured mentoring will be arranged according to the needs of the team together with the mentor and will consist of a series of meetings.

Step 4 – ENHANCING TEAM ACTIVITIES FOR PROBLEM/SOLUTION IDENTIFICATION |ONLINE| July 11th and 18th, 14:30 – 16:30 both days; August 29th 2025, 14:30 – 16:30.

The food system’s complexity allows you to pinpoint a problem of local/global dimension and begin to analyse it concerning your team’s knowledge, competencies, and values. It also requires a degree of analytical and critical thinking to reflect on the problem’s business value. In step 4, the mentors and the Innovator Fellowship team will support you in consolidating the problem and smoothing down different opinions within the team dynamics. Ultimately, your business proposition will start to be shaped for the next step of refinements.

Step 5 – INNO-CAMP |ON-SITE| September 2nd – 6th 2025 (4.5 days on-site activities)
DESIGN THINKING & BUSINESS MODELLING FOR IDEA DEFINITION
(Per Diem support is foreseen for travel and subsistence)

The Innovation Camp will challenge your assumptions and redefine your problem to initiate the ideation process and create an innovative solution. Design Thinking and Business Modelling are at the core of this process. This is when you build a solid business proposition, enhance collaborations within your team, and develop in a cohesive Innovator Fellowship cohort. A team and teamwork are the ultimate assets for executing any function in a real work context, and the ability to collaborate is the key strategic factor. Collaborative joint effort to transform an idea into a business idea will remain a prerogative of the programme.
This step will be done ON-SITE in an attractive European city with flight connections.

Step 6 – BUSINESS4GROWTH – |ONLINE|
Business Planning – October 2th – 3th, and 15th – 16th 2025 (three days).

Step 6 is the core entrepreneurial education training. The training courses are tailor-made, unique, business-driven momentum, delivered by highly specialised experts. They cover areas designed to enable the teams to acquire entrepreneurial and transversal skills to develop and implement their ideas. The talents will broaden their horizons and deepen their competencies, learning how to analyse your idea from different angles to have a viable, financially sustainable, and impactful project/product or service impacting the Food system. Moreover, through regular team meetings, the teams will continue to fine-tune their initial idea into a mature proposal to expand opportunities for further financial support.

Step 7. FINAL PITCH EVENT |ONSITE| – InnovAbility: from research space to new business ventures. November 21st, 2025 (half day – morning). (Per Diem support is foreseen for travel and subsistence)

After an exciting few months of work, the final event is where teams present their fully developed business ideas to experts and venture capitalists. This programme’s winners will access services for prototyping, market analysis, and fine-tuning business planning.
This step will be done ON-SITE in an attractive European city with flight connections.