The CDTI Innovation launches the call for Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems 2025 with 14.2 million to accelerate knowledge transfer with interregional networks

The CDTI Innovation, the state innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU), opens on December 17, 2025 the deadline for the submission of applications for Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems 2025, a competitive call for grants focused on the promotion of ecosystems and innovative interregional environments more connected and effective in the transfer, dissemination and enhancement of knowledge. This action is in line with the MICIU Complementary Knowledge Transfer Plan framework, designed to foster collaboration between territories and strengthen transfer capacities where they produce greater social and economic value, in response to the challenge of generating solutions that reach the real economy, public services, health, energy, mobility and territory supported not in specific actions but in a sustainable structure of organized cooperation, moving from a model of isolated projects to another of collaborative ecosystem that multiplies the impact.

Building Multigovernance for a Matrix Transfer Policy

To promote this acceleration in the conversion of knowledge into value, the call for Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems 2025 focuses on supporting the development of architecture and structure that allows the transfer to take place with scale and speed: shared diagnoses, work plans, technological and innovation roadmaps, common methodologies, training and dissemination actions, advice and preparation of R+D+I proposals and the creation of networks and meeting points that connect capacities and demand. The objective is to move from timely cooperation to organized cooperation, from transfer understood as a project end to transfer as a structural and continuous public policy, a transformation that depends not on the mere financing of R&D but on promoting a less visible but decisive basis: a stable and competitive cooperation infrastructure, coherent between institutional levels and oriented to territorial impact.

Five sociotechnical challenges for a purposeful transfer

The call directs the proposals towards five sociotechnical challenges for real transformations that, in practice, guide the transfer from public-public and public-private cooperative actions.

• Challenge I - Fair and equitable ecological transition: agri-food system with sustainability, cohesion and health.
• Challenge II - Energy transition: robust, efficient and sustainable electrical system with clean energies.
• Challenge III - Preserve to transform: vital heritage as a vector of balanced territorial development.
• Challenge IV - Determinants in health and care: new socioeconomic spaces.
• Challenge V - Systemic transformation: sustainable, connected, efficient and safe mobility.

The call has been designed jointly by MICIU and CDTI Innovation, with the support of the IDI Network as a mechanism for multi-level strategic coordination between autonomous communities and the General Administration of the State, to optimize also the mobilization of resources and access to European funding.

Who can participate: balanced consortia and oriented to real cooperation

• The aid is aimed at groups of legal persons, under the terms provided for in the regulatory regulations, who meet complementary capacities and carry out actions in cooperation.
• Each grouping shall consist of a minimum of four and a maximum of eight entities.
• The participation of a knowledge generating center or knowledge transfer office and a business or business association is required to ensure the integration of key agents.
• The design of the consortium is a strategic piece: each partner must assume between 10% and 70% of the total eligible budget and all commercial entities will not be able to exceed 30% of the total eligible budget.
• The actions must be deployed in at least three autonomous communities among those specified in the call (Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, Asturias, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castilla y León, Valencian Community, Galicia, La Rioja, Region of Murcia, Aragon, Catalonia, Navarre and Basque Country). This requirement makes interregionality a substantive element: it is not enough to add partners but it is necessary to design cooperation and activities with interterritorial traction.

What is funded: roadmaps, knowledge circulation and ready-to-go projects

• Each action must have a budget of between 120,000 euros and 1,000,000 euros and the minimum per beneficiary will be 30,000 euros.
• The call will finance activities aimed at building and dynamizing ecosystems: shared diagnostics and studies, work plans and technological and innovation roadmaps; actions for dissemination, advice and preparation of R+D+I proposals; training and promotion of scientific-technological capabilities; and the generation of networks and meeting points between agents of the system.
• Eligible costs include personnel, materials, training, counseling, studies, outreach and travel, and subcontracting with a limit of up to 50% of the eligible budget.
• Execution will begin in 2026 and end on December 31, 2027 (or June 30, 2028, as appropriate).

Why it’s important: territorial cohesion, transfer, less gap and more innovation that transforms

The public value of this call is summed up by the idea that the transfer is not decreed: it is organized. This organization requires public policies capable of aligning incentives, connecting actors and sustaining cooperation over time. The transformative axes of the call have been determined:

• By cohesion and competitiveness: by specifying the requirement of cooperation in three or more communities, this instrument encourages dispersed capacities to connect and generate critical mass, reducing the “two-speed Spain” in innovation. This is specifically one of the objectives proposed by MICIU for the Complementary Plan: to facilitate cooperation between regional ecosystems and reduce gaps, promoting sustainable, inclusive and equitable development models.
• For effectiveness: the transfer usually fails not because of lack of ideas but because of lack of intermediation, governance and circulation of knowledge. In this call, financial support is provided to finance this “invisible engine” that converts scientific and technological results into project portfolios, lasting alliances and opportunities for SMEs, knowledge centers and administrations.
• By strategic alignment: the action is integrated into PEICTI 2024–2027 and its programs managed by the CDTI. Actions such as this are included in the Strategic Plan 2024–2027 of the CDTI Innovation, which specifies the launch of new support modalities and actions to promote technology transfer from an ecosystem base.

Together, the call for Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems 2025 reinforces a commitment to the country-message that innovation is not only a sum of projects but a policy of intelligent connection between knowledge, company, institutions and territory.

The application period will remain open until February 12, 2026.

Link to the publication of the announcement:

https://www.cdti.es/sites/default/files/2025-12/ecosistemas_2025_conv.pdf

More information on the CDTI website:

https://www.cdti.es/ayudas/ecosistemas-de-innovacion-y-transferencia-2025

The Center for Technological Development and Innovation, E.P.E. (CDTI Innovation) is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

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