EUROPEAN COMMISSION - RESEARCH & INNOVATION
The European Commission plans to launch a € 2 Million Horizon prize on social innovation in the area of Aging Population to stimulate novel replicable solutions for the benefit of European citizens. By 2025 more than 20% of Europeans will be 65 or over, with a particularly rapid increase in the number of people aged over 80 years.
For selecting the specific challenge to be addressed, the European Commission invited citizens to "vote" through an easy to use on-line system. The general public were invited to cast their vote online via the ec.europa.eu domain from all across Europe on among following five topics:
- Obesity in children
- Aging population
- Immigrants in the labour market
- Women entrepreneurship and women-led enterprises
- Citizens for clean energy
The topic with the most votes was Aging Population. An inducement prize, incentivizing communities to bring about innovations to solve problems in the area, will be launched in 2017. The specific rules of the contest will be published in 2017 by the European Commission on the Participant Portal but also actively publicised elsewhere to maximise participation. The European Commission will directly launch and manage the contest and award the prize based on the judgement of independent experts.