About
About INITIATE
Helping European universities reorganise around research and innovation — starting in the countries that need it most.
Europe's green and digital transition needs a lot more trained experts, and it needs them fast. Universities are where those experts are made, but many institutions, especially in Widening countries (EU regions that have historically received less R&I funding), struggle to restructure fast enough to keep up. INITIATE exists to close that gap: it's a 42-month, EU-funded project helping higher education institutions redesign themselves — their departments, their partnerships, their researcher career paths — so they can do more, better-connected, higher-impact research and innovation, particularly in the energy transition.
Why this matters
The EU has spent three decades building toward a fossil-fuel-free energy system — from the first energy policy resolutions in the 1980s through the European Green Deal and "Fit for 55." Studies suggest a full transition could save South East Europe alone around €20 billion a year by 2050. But none of that happens without people: engineers, policy analysts, and researchers who understand the energy transition and can carry it into government, industry, and academia.
That's the bottleneck INITIATE targets. Higher education institutions, particularly in Widening countries, often face structural barriers: siloed departments, weak links to industry, limited funding know-how, and little cross-border collaboration. INITIATE's job is to identify those barriers case by case, and help institutions actually restructure around them.
How INITIATE works
The INITIATE approach runs through four connected phases:
- 1
Understanding
Map each institution's baseline: barriers, stakeholders, existing initiatives.
- 2
Transforming
Co-design the actual institutional changes — new departments, new structures.
- 3
Informing
Share tools and knowledge: website, Knowledge Hub, hackathon, Investment Advisor.
- 4
Learning
Exchange programmes, study visits, and a lasting Alliance for green energy transition.
Two tools sit at the centre of this: the INITIATE Knowledge Hub, an open library of training materials, research, and a place for experts to connect and ask questions; and the web-based Investment Advisor, a free tool (built for citizens and small communities, not just specialists) that helps you work out whether a small-scale renewable energy project — solar, storage, wind — makes sense where you live, and how you could fund it.
Where it's happening
INITIATE isn't theoretical — it's being tested, right now, at three university pilot sites, each tackling a different kind of transformation.
What we're aiming for
By the end of the project, INITIATE is targeting:
- 3
- institutional reforms completed at pilot universities
- 100+
- experts trained or engaged across the R&I community
- 10+
- open-access scientific publications
- 200+
- registered users of the INITIATE Knowledge Hub
- 6+
- university alliances connected for long-term collaboration
- 1
- new Alliance for green energy transition, formed to outlast the project
Built by a 13-partner consortium
INITIATE is coordinated by the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (UNIZAG FSB), working alongside universities, research institutes, and industry partners across Croatia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Ukraine, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Portugal, and Romania — plus the European Sustainable Energy Innovation Alliance (ESEIA), which connects INITIATE to a much wider network of European universities.
Get involved
Follow the project, explore the tools we're building, or join the conversation.