Covid-19 Lockdown Impact On The Evaluation Process Of The Eic Accelerator Programme

The European Member States’ economies struggle nowadays with the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, that affected all the economic sectors. Consequently, the most important macroeconomic indicators registered previously unseen negative trends. In this respect, the article presents the administrative measures applied by the Executive Agency for SMEs (EASME) to optimize the evaluation process during the lockdown period. The measures are now extended to all the evaluations of the proposals submitted through various programmes, since no physical presence meetings are yet allowed. A comparative analysis of previous evaluation process will be presented, depicting the challenges, opportunities and risks of the online evaluation set up. The aggregated data used were collected via the official communication made by the EIC Accelerator Programme, Funding and Tenders Portal and the reports from the European Commission (EC) to the Member States. The lessons learnt were three-fold: The citizens’ health and the economic welfare were the two drivers of all the administrative measures taken; Ad-hoc Task Forces, reactive and adaptive measures to mitigate the effects of lockdown were put quickly in place; New accountability models for improving the client-oriented approach were designed to respond to the pandemic challenges.