Equity or More Winners

A fundamental strategic question is emerging in European innovation policy:

🎯 What is the EIC Accelerator really trying to optimise?

💰 Equity or More Winners? What Should the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) prioritize?

The EIC Accelerator offers up to €2.5M in grants and €10M in equity per company.

But with a limited budget, a key question emerges:

What is the objective of the programme

Should we:

• Support as many promising deep-tech companies as possible through grants alone?
• Or allocate large combined packages (grant + equity) to a small group and help them scale aggressively?

This is not a purely technical design choice.

It reflects two different philosophies of how public innovation funding should operate.

Understanding the nature of equity

Let’s be clear:

Equity is not free money.

It is dilutive.

The EIC Fund becomes a shareholder and expects an exit in 5–10 years.

That is fundamentally different from a grant, in purpose, in structure, and in risk profile.

Where did the equity model come from

So we must ask:

🔍 Did the equity model stem from strong applicant demand?

Or was it a strategic policy choice by the European Commission to plug the scale-up gap?

The answer matters.

Because it determines whether the instrument is demand-driven or policy-driven.

The structural trade-off

📌 The trade-off is real:

• More winners means broader impact and greater diversity across the ecosystem
• Fewer, well-funded winners means deeper individual scaling potential

Both approaches can be justified.

But they lead to very different outcomes.

The FP10 decision point

FP10 is the moment to revisit this choice.

The question is not whether grants or equity are better.

It is how to balance them to maximise long-term impact for Europe.

The strategic question

💬 What do you think? What drives more long-term value for Europe?