EU Innovation Radar highlights developments from the Human Brain Project

    13 November 2024


    The new edition of the EU’s Innovation Radar highlights Innovations stemming from the Human Brain Project (HBP). Running from 2013 to 2023, the HBP was a FET Flagship Project of the European Commission, with one of its key outcomes being the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure. EBRAINS supports or makes available many of the innovations, and a number of them have made the step to commercial offerings as spinoffs. 

    Check out the results of the EU’s innovation radar at https://innovation-radar.ec.europa.eu/ and find HBP-Innovations with the search term “Human Brain Project”.

    The list is based on an assessment by the Joint Research Center JRC, that categorises the innovations by different readiness levels and market creation potential. Below are some selected examples from the latest update of the Innovation Radar assessment. The list includes information on the innovation, the HBP project phase and HBP-consortium partner leading the development, as well as the relation to the UNs Sustainable Development Goals.
    Some examples:

    A high-channel count neuroprosthesis to restore rudimentary vision for blind individuals
    Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen - KNAW - The Netherlands

    CESPAR - Digital twin simulations of coupled assistive robotic devices and human musculoskeletal systems for neurorehabilitation
    Alpine Instuition Sarl – Switzerland

    Health Data Cloud – Virtual Research Environment for legally compliant research on sensitive data operated and maintained by CHARITE
    Charité - Universitaetsmedizin Berlin – Germany

    openMINDS: an expert and community-driven metadata framework for linked data in neuroscience
    Universitetet I Oslo - Norway
    Forschungszentrum Julich Gmbh - Germany
    Centre national de la recherche scientifique CNRS - France

    Perturbational Complexity Index for detecting consciousness (PCI)
    Universita Degli Studi Di Milano – Italy

    Prostheses for spinal cord neurostimulation
    Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois - Switzerland
    Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne - Switzerland

    Virtual Brain Cloud – Service for Human Digital Twin Simulations in public Clouds
    Charité - Universitaetsmedizin Berlin - Germany

    Bayesian Virtual Epileptic Patient (BVEP): Personalized brain models for better surgery outcome in epilepsy
    University of Marseille 

    SpiNNaker - a Spiking Neural Network architecture – a digital neuromorphic computing platform for brain modelling and energy-efficient AI
    The University of Manchester

    MIP – The Medical Informatics Platform for Privacy Preserving, Federated Data Processing and Analytics
    Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois – Switzerland

    About the Innovation Radar 

    The Innovation Radar aims to identify high-potential innovations and innovators. It is an important source of actionable intelligence on innovations emerging from research and innovation projects funded through European Union programmes. Data underpinning the Innovation Radar stem from a survey developed by the Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CONNECT) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. This survey is conducted during periodic reviews of collaborative projects funded through European Union (framework) programmes like Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020.

    4 Maturity Levels of innovations

    To capture the different maturity levels of innovations towards commercialisation, four innovation categories have been created based on respective scores of the Innovation Management and Innovation Readiness Indicators: Market Ready, Tech Ready, Business Ready and Exploring. The 'Market Creation Potential’ Indicator (MCPI) is a novel indicator system that automatically categorizes innovations in terms of disruptive potential. Innovations that show signs of such market creation potential are then assigned one of 5 levels (from ‘low’ to ‘very high’). More about the JRCs methodology can be found here.