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

CDTI Innovación, the state innovation agency under the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU), will open the application period for the 2025 Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems on December 17, 2025. This competitive grant call focuses on promoting more connected and efficient interregional innovation ecosystems and environments for knowledge transfer, dissemination, and valorization. This initiative aligns with the MICIU’s Complementary Knowledge Transfer Plan, designed to foster collaboration between territories and strengthen transfer capacities where they generate the greatest social and economic value. It responds to the challenge of creating solutions that reach the real economy, public services, health, energy, mobility, and territory, relying not on isolated actions but on a sustainable structure of organized cooperation—moving from a model of isolated projects to a collaborative ecosystem that multiplies impact.

Building Multilevel Governance for a Matrix Transfer Policy

To accelerate the conversion of knowledge into value, the 2025 Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems call focuses on supporting the development of the architecture and structure that enables transfer at scale and speed: shared diagnostics, 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 capabilities and demand. The goal is to move from ad-hoc cooperation to organized cooperation, from transfer as the end of a project to transfer as a structural and continuous public policy. This transformation depends not merely on R&D funding but on fostering a less visible yet decisive foundation: a stable and competitive cooperation infrastructure, coherent across institutional levels and oriented toward territorial impact.

Five Socio-Technical Challenges for Purposeful Transfer

The call guides proposals toward five socio-technical challenges for real transformations that, in practice, orient transfer through public-public and public-private cooperative actions:

Challenge I – Just and Equitable Ecological Transition: agro-food system with sustainability, cohesion, and health.
Challenge II – Energy Transition: robust, efficient, and sustainable electricity system with clean energy.
Challenge III – Preserve to Transform: vital heritage as a vector for balanced territorial development.
Challenge IV – Health and Care Determinants: new socio-economic spaces.
Challenge V – Systemic Transformation: sustainable, connected, efficient, and safe mobility.

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

Who Can Participate: Balanced Consortia Focused on Real Cooperation

Grants are aimed at groups of legal entities, as defined by regulatory norms, that bring complementary capabilities and carry out cooperative actions.
Each group must consist of a minimum of four and a maximum of eight entities.
Participation of a knowledge-generating center or a knowledge transfer office and a company or business association is required to ensure integration of key actors.
Consortium design is strategic: each partner must assume between 10% and 70% of the total eligible budget, and the total contribution of commercial entities cannot exceed 30% of the total eligible budget.
Activities must take place in at least three autonomous communities from those specified in the call (Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, Asturias, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile and León, Valencian Community, Galicia, La Rioja, Region of Murcia, Aragon, Catalonia, Navarra, and Basque Country). This requirement makes interregionality a substantive element: it is not enough to sum partners; cooperation and activities with interterritorial traction must be designed.

What Is Funded: Roadmaps, Knowledge Circulation, and Projects Ready to Take Off

Each project must have a budget between €120,000 and €1,000,000, with a minimum of €30,000 per beneficiary.
The call will fund activities aimed at building and energizing ecosystems: diagnostics and studies; shared work plans and technological and innovation roadmaps; dissemination, advisory, and R&D&I proposal preparation actions; training and promotion of scientific-technological capacities; and the creation of networks and meeting points among system actors.
Eligible costs include personnel, materials, training, advisory, studies, dissemination and travel, and subcontracting up to 50% of the eligible budget.
Implementation will begin in 2026 and end on December 31, 2027 (or June 30, 2028, as applicable).

Why It Matters: Territorial Cohesion, Transfer, Less Gap, and More Transformative Innovation

The public value of this call can be summarized as the idea that transfer is not decreed—it is organized. This organization requires public policies capable of aligning incentives, connecting actors, and sustaining cooperation over time. The call’s transformative axes are:

Cohesion and Competitiveness: by specifying the requirement for cooperation in three or more communities, this instrument encourages dispersed capabilities to connect and generate critical mass, reducing Spain’s “two-speed” innovation. This is specifically one of MICIU’s objectives for the Complementary Plan: to facilitate cooperation between regional ecosystems and reduce gaps, promoting sustainable, inclusive, and equitable development models.
Effectiveness: transfer often fails not due to lack of ideas but due to lack of intermediation, governance, and knowledge circulation. This call provides financial support to fund this “invisible engine” that transforms scientific and technological results into project portfolios, lasting alliances, and opportunities for SMEs, knowledge centers, and administrations.
Strategic Alignment: the initiative is integrated into PEICTI 2024–2027 and its programs managed by CDTI. Actions like this are included in CDTI Innovation’s 2024–2027 Strategic Plan, which specifies the launch of new support modalities and actions to foster technology transfer from an ecosystem-based approach.

Overall, the 2025 Innovation and Transfer Ecosystems call reinforces a commitment to the country-wide message that innovation is not just a sum of projects but a policy of intelligent connection between knowledge, business, institutions, and territory.

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

Link to the call publication:
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 the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI Innovation) is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities.

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