For CELTIC-NEXT, 2025 is a year of renewal. The 2nd EUREKA Clusters’ Programme starts in July 2025, and a new, updated SRIA will enable future successful innovation support and change. Let’s look at what was achieved in the first half of 2025 and what we plan for the rest of the year.

2025’s first half’s achievements

It was an intensive first half year for many reasons. As the Director of our Cluster, I had to prepare our application for a renewed license to operate as EUREKA Cluster. With the support of our Chairman, David Kennedy, we delivered a high-quality application. We are confident that we will be authorised to act further under the EUREKA license from July 2025 onwards. CELTIC-NEXT has strongly contributed to the new EUREKA Clusters’ Programme (ECP) Arrangement framework documents redaction and the Clusters’ operations license form. This intense engagement will continue with taking the lead on the ECP Handbook of processes, working with the other clusters and the Public Authorities. This work is essential as it will define more harmonised processes between clusters and with the Public Authorities to address current challenges of the ECP, such as the time to start a project after it has been labelled. Finally, I have the honour to have been chosen to represent the ECP Clusters as spokesperson to the new EUREKA Presidency of Switzerland from the 1st of July 2025 to the 30th of June 2026.

The EUREKA Network is currently under Canadian and German co-presidency until the beginning of June 2025. Switzerland will then take over for one year, until June 2026!

The dual presidency of Canada and Germany was new in EUREKA’s history; it has shown how excellent international and inter-continental R&D&I cooperation is. Canada wishes to have more projects with CELTIC-NEXT in the coming years. We have started discussions on how to make it possible for Canada to bring companies to CELTIC-NEXT brokerage events. This means that we will integrate this into our event planning as it requires time to assemble such delegations to travel to Europe.

We have started collecting our community’s feedback on our strategic research and innovation roadmap (SRIA), which we are currently updating. The target is to provide this new SRIA as input to our participation in the new ECP period starting July 2025. The duration of the new ECP is still under discussion but it is already decided to make it longer than the original four years, à priori seven years. We will incorporate this new SRIA in our Launch Events and Proposers’ Brokerage Days, starting second half 2025, to allow consortia to propose innovative projects in a more extensive variety of technologies, services, applications, and verticals. This reinforces our traditional bottom-up approach. We will continue to run our Spring and Autumn Calls based on our successful legacy. This is a unique selling point of CELTIC as a Eureka Cluster compared to other international funding schemes.

Running Calls

When this edition of the CELTIC-NEXT’s News is published, the Spring Call 2025 would have closed. Therefore, it is already time to announce the Autumn Call 2025! The Autumn Call 2025 will be launched in July 2025 via an online event. The Proposers’ Brokerage Day will take place in a physical presence at the beginning of September 2025. The precise date and location will be announced via our Newsletter and website. The submission will close on the 24th of October 2025 for a labelling decision before mid-December 2025. Forecasted possible start period for labelled projects would be the first half of 2026. We can also happily say that more countries support CELTIC-NEXT, like Chile, Lithuania, and soon Brazil.

Flagships SUSTAINET is started!

The new flagship, SUSTAINET, was labelled for its initial application in June 2024. Its central theme is network resilience, energy efficiency, sustainability, high-performing end-to-end networks, and network security. In the meantime, SUSTAINET and its three sub-projects have started. Despite being in the ramp-up phase, SUSTAINET has already begun its dissemination work, notably by attending the Hannover Messe .

More detailed information on SUSTAINET is provided in the corresponding article in this CELTIC-NEXT News issue.

The CELTIC-NEXT office is happy to connect with potential new additional partners interested in joining the flagship during the ramp-up phase. Please contact us at .

Acquiring new Core Group memberships

The director of CELTIC-NEXT has the mandate from CELTIC-NEXT’s Core Group to propose and integrate new industry members into the existing Core Group. Some discussions are ongoing for some industrial companies.

Outlook for 2025 second half

2025 is the year of the renewal of CELTIC-NEXT as EUREKA Cluster under the new EUREKA Clusters Programme (ECP). The new ECP is foreseen to last seven years, providing the EUREKA Clusters with extended visibility into the future and, therefore, elaborating a stronger path for growth. 2025 should be a year of growth, starting with the upcoming new ECP framework arrangement, the renewed trust and support of existing partnering Public Authorities, and new incoming funding countries like Lithuania, Chile and Brazil!

2025 will continue to be the year of the new flagship(s) implementation, a strong collaborative effort from all stakeholders, consortia participants, the CELTIC-NEXT Office, and the involved Public Authorities!

Stay tuned by visiting our Call Calendar page: https://www.celticnext.eu/call-calendar/ and/or by subscribing to our Newsletter under https://www.celticnext.eu/news-subscription/

Further information

Project launch: https://www.celticnext.eu/sustainet-showcased-at-hannover-messe-2025/