Excellence Hubs: a WIDERA call for Widening countries

The Excellence Hubs call opened on 2 September 2026 with a deadline of 4 March 2027 at 17:00 Brussels time. The topic code is HORIZON-WIDERA-2027-04-WIDENING-01, the action type is CSA, and the procedure runs in a single stage.

This sits in the WIDERA part of Horizon Europe, which means it addresses Widening countries. Ukraine belongs to that group, so in calls like this one it competes against a narrower field than in the general Pillar II calls.

Six months to the deadline is exactly the runway a multi-country consortium needs. So this guide covers what the call funds, the structure it demands, and what to start on now.

What the call funds

Excellence Hubs build regional research and innovation ecosystems in Widening countries. The logic here rests on durable links between four types of player.

The topic description describes this as quadruple-helix collaboration: academia, business and SMEs, the public sector, and civil society. Projects must foster a regional innovation culture aligned with regional or national smart specialisation strategies.

Mandatory components

• A joint cross-border research and innovation strategy, aligned with smart specialisation strategies and EU priorities. This forms the foundation of the proposal.
• A research component as a distinct work package. It has to close knowledge gaps and generate technology with market potential, while staying away from the dominant share of the budget.
• Investment plans and pre-planning of pilots or demonstrators.
• Secondments between participants, to cement durable collaboration and industrial uptake.

The consequence worth seeing at once. A proposal built as a research project with a collaboration annex misses this call. Here the collaboration is the substance, and research forms one work package within it.

The amounts and one discrepancy between sources

The Commission estimates an EU contribution of EUR 1.5 to 4.5 million per project, while noting separately that proposals with different amounts may be submitted and selected.

On the overall topic budget the sources diverge. Work programme listings give EUR 15 million, while reports published after the call opened give EUR 100 million. For comparison, the 2023 Excellence Hubs call carried an indicative budget of EUR 60 million and drew 205 proposals.

The gap between 15 and 100 million is the gap between roughly 5 and roughly 30 funded projects, so it bears directly on your odds. Before applying, verify the figure in the WIDERA work programme text itself and in the call document on the portal.

Synergies to check before drafting

The call explicitly requires consortia to seek synergies and avoid overlaps with a list of existing initiatives. That list is specific, so work through it point by point.

• European Innovation Ecosystems;
• EIC Pathfinder;
• the Knowledge and Innovation Communities of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), above all the EIT Community Hubs established in Widening countries;
• the Joint Research Centre Partnerships for Regional Innovation;
• the Widening Dissemination and Exploitation Facility.

In practice that means two things. First, where an EIT Community Hub already operates in your region, you either bring it into the consortium or explain the demarcation in the proposal. Second, evaluators will check this point, so a general sentence about synergies earns no marks.

What to do before March

Six months looks generous, although for a structure of four participant types across two countries that is a realistic minimum.

• September and October: assemble the quadruple helix. The academic partner is usually in place, while business, a public authority and a civil society organisation each need separate negotiation. This is the stage where proposals most often stall.
• November: align the smart specialisation strategy. The cross-border strategy has to rest on existing regional documents.
• December and January: investment plans and pilots. This part cannot be written in a week, because it needs agreement with business and government.
• February: assembly, synergy check, internal review.

Advice on a specific topic comes free: the list of national contact points in Ukraine is published openly, and the NCP for your thematic area reads the same documents as the evaluators.

The Excellence Hubs strand is run by the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Its page publishes the history of previous rounds, including submission statistics, and reviewing it before drafting pays off, because it gives a realistic picture of the competition.