Meet the nominees! EU|BIC Excellence Award 2026

What does it actually mean to put people at the centre of your work as a deliberate design choice — something you built, tested, and can point to results from? That was the question at the heart of this year’s EU|BIC Excellence Award.

The response was strong. EU|BIC community members submitted programmes that took that challenge seriously. Five have been shortlisted. They come from five countries. They work with five very different populations. They take five distinct approaches. But each of them made the same fundamental decision: to design programmes around people first. Let’s see who did it best!

CEEI Burgos (Spain) In one of Europe’s most sparsely populated provinces, viable rural businesses were failing not for lack of ideas, but for lack of accessible finance.

CEEI Burgos built a microcredit programme for entrepreneurs. Operating where a single business can mean the difference between a community surviving or not, Sodebur Rural Microcredits lends based on trust and proximity rather than collateral. It has sustained 536 jobs across 132 localities since 2013.

University of Warwick Science Park (United Kingdom) Most organisations experimenting with AI never get their tools into production. Promising prototypes stall under real-world conditions, governance gaps widen, and trust erodes.

University of Warwick Science Park built a programme to close that gap. The Ignite Applied AI Lab puts SMEs, startups and researchers inside a governed, production-ready deployment environment from day one — teaching responsible AI not as theory but as practice. Every participant leaves with a working, deployable product.

Instituto Pedro Nunes (Portugal) Portugal’s Centro Region is ageing fast. People over 50 face the steepest barriers to employment in the country. IPN decided to treat that demographic pressure as an entrepreneurial opportunity rather than a problem to manage.

Fator C’Idade is an incubator built entirely around people over 50 who want to turn experience into a business. Running three annual cycles of acceleration, capacity building and incubation, the programme mobilised more than 80 participants in its first year alone, generating 19 projects and 16 incubation contracts.

a|cube (Italy) Welfare systems across Europe are under growing pressure. The sector has historically been slow to attract entrepreneurial innovation. Early-stage startups with real solutions struggled to find structured support that took both their business model and their social impact seriously.

Personae accelerated early-stage startups tackling welfare challenges. Across three editions, from eating disorders to neurorehabilitation, it received 511 applications, and selected ventures received €100,000 in initial investment alongside structured impact measurement from day one.

MSIC (Czechia) The Moravian-Silesian Region has long struggled with a negative migration balance. Skilled international professionals arrive, find the system hard to navigate, such as language barriers and administrative complexity, and leave.

The Ostrava Expat Centre became the single place where international talent and their families can find work, start a business, or simply settle into the region. Free, bilingual and embedded in the wider innovation ecosystem, it delivered 288 consultations and 68 events in 2024 alone, helping retain skilled people in a region that cannot afford to lose them.

These five programmes will pitch on stage at EBN Congress 2026 in Trentino on 18 June. The audience in the room will choose the winner.

Over the coming weeks, we will publish a dedicated post on each programme. Stay tuned.