EIC Pathfinder Challenges 2026

Expected Impact:

The main impacts of this Challenge will be:

• A new generation of energetically autonomous systems enabling new services that will improve the life of European citizens through applications in areas such as point of care diagnostics, smart sustainable cities etc.
• Supporting sustainability in energy consumption and production in keeping with the ambitions of RePowerEU^[1] and the Green Deal^[2], and
• Enhancement of the sustainability of IoTs and energetically autonomous systems in general.

Expected Outcome:

Ambitious proposals put forward under this call will:

• identify a new generation of advanced materials for miniaturised energy harvesting modules, and
• achieve TRL 4 for the resulting energetically autonomous systems.

Portfolio Approach

The portfolio of selected projects should lead to the development of a variety of advanced materials applied to a range of miniaturised energy harvesting modules and final integrated systems.

To achieve this objective, the following factors will inform the choice of projects in the portfolio:

• Phenomena exploited to harvest energy from the environment (e.g. solar, thermoelectric, piezoelectric, nanotribological etc.)
• Composition of the proposed advanced materials, and
• Field of application (e.g. agriculture, automotive, health monitoring, wearables, smart city management, energy management, industrial monitoring etc.).

The selected projects will be assigned to lead and/or engage in portfolio activities centred on the following priorities:

• benchmarking to compare proposed technologies, phenomena exploited, advanced materials used and approaches
• sharing scientific considerations, results on the different physical/chemical phenomena studied to advance the knowledge and foster new disclosures in the field with potential shifts in the paradigm
• sharing insights on integration of the modules to solve potential issues and help advance towards delivering effective operational energetically autonomous systems
• developing an integrated approach with different complimentary energy harvesting modules for specific use-cases and to enhance the final energy harvested, and
• communicating to target audiences such as corporates, investors, alongside the broader public to raise awareness on the topic with a view to accelerating the adoption of these radical innovations.

Objective:

Applicants to this Challenge must address all of the following objectives:

• The identification and development of innovative advanced materials for energy harvesting, harnessing new physical/ chemical phenomena, leading to a radical shift in application range and performance while reducing the reliance on Critical Raw Materials (CRMs)
• The implementation of the advanced materials in a miniaturised energy harvesting module, such as, but not limited to, miniaturised solar cells, thermoelectric generators (e.g. TEG), nanotribological/ piezoelectric devices, electromagnetic wave harvesting devices
• Integration of the miniaturised energy harvesting modules in energetically autonomous systems (e.g. wireless integrated sensors) and
• Benchmarking the harvesting modules in a representative use case in a laboratory environment (TRL 4) with a view to demonstrating significant efficiency improvements, in terms of energy harvested, compared to the state of the art.

Leveraging digital tools such as AI to accelerate the process of identifying, designing, fabricating, and characterising these new materials is encouraged.

All proposals should also identify potential markets and the associated impacts of their innovations.

Scope:

Background and Scope

The exponential rise in the development and deployment of IoT (Internet of Things) systems and of connected objects (~100 billion by 2025 and ~250 billion by 2030^[3],[4]) will in turn increase the number of sensor networks required to provide data on the ground, with estimates pointing to ~1Trillion by 2025 and ~10 trillion by 2040

A consequence of such an expansion is a commensurate increase in energy consumption coupled with detrimental impacts on environmental sustainability: studies point to the total electricity consumed by IoTs in 2040, equalling total global energy consumption at present. Moreover, the sensor networks, generally powered by batteries, will result in 80 million batteries having to be changed each day, with knock-on effects on the wider environment.

Mitigating the impact of a rising number of such devices calls for solutions that will reduce energy consumption and increase the energy autonomy of connected sensors such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and of the IoT systems integrating such sensors.

This Challenge therefore focuses on the development of a new generation of advanced materials^[5] to deliver miniaturised integrated energy harvesting devices, with significantly enhanced performance compared to the state of the art, that will give rise to highly effective energetically autonomous devices and systems.

This Challenge supports the ambitions of the European Commission Communication “Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership^[6]”, which identified an urgent need to boost the development of advanced materials to enhance the EU’s strategic autonomy in strategic fields while addressing sustainability, circularity and safety issues.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/topics/energy/repowereu_en

[2] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en

[3] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-5584-8_3

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/

[5] Advanced materials are understood as materials that are rationally designed to have (i) new or enhanced properties, and/or (ii) targeted or enhanced structural features with the objective to achieve specific or improved functional performance. This includes both new emerging manufactured materials (high tech materials), and materials that are manufactured from traditional materials (low tech materials). OECD working description on advanced materials https://one.oecd.org/document/ENV/CBC/MONO(2022)29/en/pdf

[6] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/research-area/industrial-research-and-innovation/chemicals-and-advanced-materials/advanced-materials-industrial-leadership_en