Client: Aarhus University and Allwaters EIT Water Consortium
Date: November 2025
Location: Europe-wide
In an era of escalating climatic shifts, water has become the critical nexus linking European prosperity to environmental resilience. In collaboration with Aarhus University and the Allwaters consortium, Bax played a key role in the development of a successful proposal for EIT Water – the EU’s 10th KIC – a large-scale European partnership designed to address specific global challenges by connecting the Knowledge Triangle: business, education, and research.
EIT Water will be awarded up to €700M in funding over the next fifteen years.
Challenge
Water is Europe’s most valuable asset, enabling 26% of the EU’s gross value added across sectors, such as water management, offshore energy aquaculture, agriculture or fisheries, while underpinning the strong growth of the water, marine and maritime (WMM) sectors. At the same time, water is Europe´s greatest liability. Overexploitation (e.g., water abstraction and intensified marine multi-use), pollution, and degradation across the WMM sectors and ecosystems is compounded by the increased impacts from climate change and external water-related threats. These pressures continue to undermine the potential added value all our waters can provide, while amplifying negative impacts and losses. For example, nutrient pollution costs Europe over €75B annually. On the other hand, close to €500B are at risk due to the degradation of coastal and freshwater ecosystems (EC, 2024).
Approach
Building on our previous experience leading the development of EIT’s Culture & Creativity KIC, Bax facilitated a highly collaborative co-creation process, integrating insights from over 100 partners into a coherent strategy document for EIT Water. The strategy included the organisation’s vision, mission, main approach and action pillars, governance structure, impact framework and financial sustainability strategy.
Impact
With the establishment of the 10th EIT KIC, up to €700M will be unlocked to drive water innovation over the next 15 years.
