At the recent Ignition Forum, the formal kick-off event for the EIC Scaling Club, we were joined by Anna Panagopoulou, the untiring Director of 'European Research Area & Innovation' at the Research and Innovation Directorate General of the European Commission.

As we on-boarded the first cohort of 48 selected deep tech scale-ups in her presence, we seized the opportunity to briefly interview Anna after her keynote address in Brussels.

Today, on 'Europe Day', we're delighted to share with you the recording of our conversation:

Anna has been working at the European Commission since 1997, so we asked how her perspective on how things have changed since then with regards to how the EU supports innovators and researchers across the bloc.

Anna now has a big role when it comes to research and innovation policy in Europe, which she explained in more detail. She also highlighted how the European Innovation Council fits into her current work areas, and how the collaboration with the EIC works in practice to benefit entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers and investors alike.

To conclude, we asked Anna about the EIC Scaling Club, and why it's so important to have initiatives like these in Europe - now and in the future.

As mentioned by Anna, at the end of the day the goal is to help the tech unicorns of tomorrow succeed on a global level, to increase Europe's competitiveness and increase the global impact those companies can make. We were happy to hear we align on this!

You can watch the interview on our YouTube channel.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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