EDIH: what the Commission expects, and how to demonstrate it

European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) hold a singular place in European digital policy: they are both support desks for SMEs and the public sector, and instruments of a continental digital catch-up strategy. That double nature has a price: the Commission expects demonstrable results from them, not intentions.

The core of an EDIH's craft is progression: assessing a company's digital maturity at entry, supporting it, re-assessing it, and showing the distance travelled. Multiplied by hundreds of supported companies, over several years, that exercise does not hold on spreadsheets.

The EDIH scheme in fact rests on an official instrument: the digital maturity assessment administered to beneficiaries at entry and along the support journey. It is no formality, it is the programme's central indicator: it materialises the progress the hub delivers for its territory.

Add to that the support volumes, the quality of services rendered, and a question that weighs ever more in the calls: sustainability. A hub must demonstrate it can live beyond the grant, with a service model and tooling whose cost is under control over time. A tooling budget thought over three years, not one, is part of the answer.

Renewal calls change the nature of the exercise: a hub applying for its second phase is no longer judged on a project, but on a track record. How many companies supported, what measured progress, what capacity to last beyond the grant: the Commission's questions are answered in data, not intentions.

Hubs that instrumented their first phase already own the material: their per-beneficiary progress curves are the heart of the file. The others discover that three years of measurement cannot be reconstituted after the fact.

A candidate or operating hub therefore has every interest in treating its tooling as a strategic decision, not an expense line. The criteria that matter: an assessment frame common to all support journeys, so the data adds up; collection that does not rest on manual reminders, since that is what exhausts teams; consolidation that produces the indicators the Commission expects without reprocessing; and the ability to follow each beneficiary over time, from one maturity test to the next.

The classic mistake is the opposite: one tool per service, exports to reconcile, and a reporting officer spending quarter-ends rebuilding what the platform should have produced on its own.

That is the approach hubs like EDIH Ireland or EDIH Occitania chose with Datamensio: the maturity test at entry, progression measured along the support journey, and consolidated report-outs for the programme's reporting. The same gesture holds for neighbouring consortia, EEN or Interreg: scattered partners, common frame, consolidated proof.