BRIDGE

Selected under Topic 1: EIT-HEI-2025-STEM-CAPACITY-BUILDING, BRIDGE supports Higher Education Institutions in unlocking underused STEM talent and creating clearer pathways from innovation learning to entrepreneurial action. The project focuses on students, researchers, staff, aspiring founders, and institutional leadership, ensuring that individual skills development is connected to long-term organisational change.

At the centre of BRIDGE is a scalable STEM Innovation Literacy micro-credential. Learners complete short, interactive video-based modules and develop a pitch artefact as a practical final assignment. These pitches create a structured opportunity pipeline, helping institutions identify promising ideas and support them through transparent, stage-gated progression.

Selected teams can move into Explore and Venture support, with onward routes toward Traction and Funding where relevant. The project combines readiness profiling, mentoring, IP and technology transfer awareness, AI-supported clustering and triage, EDI safeguards, and ecosystem engagement with industry, incubators, investors, student bodies, youth networks, and other external stakeholders. By linking learning, selection, venture support, and institutionalisation, BRIDGE aims to make STEM innovation capacity building more accessible, auditable, and repeatable across diverse European higher education contexts.