Scaling and deploying innovations in migration management

Expected outcome

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Enhanced impact of EU-funded migration research by identifying and scaling up promising innovations, methodologies, and tools from relevant Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects.
• A policy innovation ecosystem: Foster collaboration between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to adapt, scale, and deploy validated models, ensuring their scalability, sustainability, and practical application in diverse EU, national and local contexts.

Scope

Despite significant EU investment in migration research, many innovative solutions to gain insights and foresight remain underutilized in policymaking and practice. This topic aims to bridge that gap by systematically identifying, assessing, and facilitating the adoption of promising approaches developed in past EU-funded migration related projects to ensure a better fungibility between knowledge-oriented activities on past or future trends of migrations and policy making.

Proposals should map and analyse research outputs, methodologies, and innovations from relevant Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe migration projects, selecting those with high potential for policy uptake, operational implementation, market deployment and scaling. Proposals should consider ways to validate, adapt, and scale up these solutions across different governance levels (EU, national, local) and migration-related domains implementing high ethical standards and ensuring fundamental rights and privacy of all individuals affected. Applicants are encouraged to engage key stakeholders - including policymakers, migration practitioners, researchers (including from SSH disciplines), the private sector; groups or individuals that represent the interests of refugees and migrants and the civil society - to ensure that identified innovations align with real-world needs and implementation pathways and taking into account the political, legal, and cultural specificities of each Member State that influence implementation, while ensuring the solutions are transferable across contexts. Proposals are encouraged to take into consideration the assessment of the societal and political impacts as well as recommendations of previously funded Horizon research projects on migration. To that end, proposals are encouraged to carry out a mapping exercise.

Activities may include pilots, policy labs, co-creation processes, or other mechanisms to enhance the transferability of research outcomes into policies and operational frameworks.

A core element of the action will be fostering a structured dialogue between the research community and decision-makers to ensure continuous knowledge transfer and innovation mainstreaming. The initiative should contribute to a more dynamic, responsive and anticipatory EU migration ecosystem in the intersection of policy and research, in line with the objectives of the EU Pact on Asylum and Migration and other relevant policy frameworks.

Proposals may incorporate a gender-sensitive and intersectional approach in their research if relevant, by collecting data based for example on age, ability, ethnic and racial background, sex, socioeconomic status, and religion or belief to ensure that identified migration-related innovations align with real-world needs of people in migratory situation.

Proposals should delineate the plans for further applications of the knowledge, solutions and findings generated by their research at national and EU level. Knowledge and findings may be used with EU co-financing of instruments such as the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) and/or subsequent funding instruments.

Proposals may envisage JRC participation, particularly to support the assessment of relevance, scalability and uptake of innovative solutions in migration management. The JRC could contribute with its knowledge of EU's migration systems, foresight, and capacity to bridge research and policymaking.