ELEVATE is a dynamic EIT Higher Education Initiative designed to accelerate entrepreneurship and innovation capacity across critical sectors: Food Biotech, Biomedicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs). By integrating diverse knowledge areas, the program fosters value creation, generates startups, and develops knowledge-intensive solutions within a unique, interdisciplinary, and co-creation-driven environment.

Spanning six EU regional ecosystems—Portugal’s North, Centre, and Lisbon regions; Italy’s Friuli Venezia Giulia and Emilia Romagna regions; and Central Denmark—ELEVATE leverages distinct regional characteristics and existing structures to drive systematic transformation. It provides a novel acceleration program that bridges academic innovations with market-ready solutions, attracting investment and supporting new ventures. The initiative also enhances the competitiveness of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) by transforming their internal structures to better support technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and graduate employability, notably through an improved core curriculum.