Europe’s transition toward a circular and sustainable bioeconomy depends both on scientific breakthroughs and on the ability to scale up innovations. However, this scale-up gap often risks hampering innovators and small companies that lack access to pilot or demonstration facilities. This is where the COPILOT project enters the picture. Funded by the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) under the Horizon Europe programme, COPILOT is a European coordination and support project designed to make the scale-up journey smoother and more collaborative. It aims to connect innovators with open-access pilot and demonstration infrastructures across Europe.
COPILOT builds on the legacy of the original Pilots4U platform, which created a public database of pilot and demonstration facilities in the bioeconomy sector. Through “Pilots4EU powered by COPILOT”, the project is now revitalising and enlarging this network to make it easier for innovators, researchers, and companies to find the right partners and infrastructures to test, validate, and industrialise their technologies. Beyond maintaining a database, COPILOT’s ambition is to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange across Europe’s bioeconomy ecosystem, connecting technology providers, pilot plant operators, investors, and policy actors.
In this context, the project has launched the OPEN CALL 3 – Part 2, offering travel vouchers for bioeconomy innovators and enablers. The initiative promotes access to and a better understanding of the purpose and work of pilot and demonstration infrastructures, encourages collaboration and networking across the sector, expands growth and scale-up opportunities, and fosters engagement within a vibrant bioeconomy community.
A total of 30 vouchers, each worth up to 500 €, are available to cover travel expenses (transport and accommodation), allowing selected beneficiaries to attend one of the study visits and related workshops organized by fifteen different Pilot and Demonstration Infrastructures (PDIs) across Europe that are active in different technology areas concerning bioeconomy.
The deadline for applications is 15 December 2025, while the visits will take place in 2026.
More insights are available here!
And for further details or doubts, we encourage interested stakeholders to join the upcoming Info Days:
- 18 November 2025 at 11 am CET – REGISTER HERE (more info will follow soon)
- 3 December 2025 at 11 am CET – REGISTER HERE (more info will follow soon)
