Climate-KIC

EIT Climate-KIC is a knowledge and innovation community established and funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in 2010. Our purpose is to tackle climate change through innovation. We are Europe’s largest public-private partnership with this purpose – a growing pan-European community of diverse organisations united by a commitment to direct the power of creativity and human ingenuity at the climate change challenge. We bring together large and small companies, scientific institutions and universities, city authorities and other public bodies, start-ups, and students. With over 350 formal organisational partners from across 25 countries, we work on innovation to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its unavoidable impacts.

Our mission is to catalyse systemic change through innovation in areas of human activity that have a critical impact on greenhouse gas emissions – cities, land use, materials and finance – and to create climate-resilient communities. Our Theory of Change is focused on empowering people to change systems – through exploration, experimentation and demonstration – to enable viable alternatives at scale.

Our approach assumes strategy as a process of active learning and continual evolution and sees innovation and learning as two sides of the same coin: when leveraged together, they are the most effective means to catalyse transformation in the face of uncertainty.

Based on this, EIT Climate-KIC greatly supports the Willem de Kooning Academie (WdKA), setting up the Expert meet-up ‘Too little, too late? Solving problems from HELL? Join THE education IDEALISTS!’. This pioneering collaboration proposes:

• To understand and identify the opportunities to unlock and innovate the curriculums among the different levels of education institutes.
• To stimulate new ways of working between education and entrepreneurial companies, supported by the municipality of Rotterdam.
• To educate (future) professionals, teachers and surrounding community with the required skills and competencies for the energy transition and the climate challenges that the region of Rotterdam needs to tackle, in order to reach its goals in 2030 and in 2050... and beyond.