D3.10 Report on an inclusive innovation system for the private sector: research funder perspective

This Deliverable D3.10 was produced within the Horizon Europe project INSPIRE. It presents the core findings of a comparative analysis of four policies aiming to foster the integration of the gender dimension into innovation projects.

Fostering gender and inclusiveness in research and innovation content has been a target of the European Research Area (ERA) for several years, and research funding organisations (RFOs) increasingly request researchers to take the gender dimension into account in their funded projects. Yet so far, little is known about how companies deal with this policy requirement when implementing publicly funded innovation projects.

This report analyses how RFOs foster inclusive gendered innovation in the private sector (Business Enterprise Sector, BES). It presents empirical findings from four public policies that address private research and innovation companies: Norm-Critical Innovation (Vinnova, Sweden), FEMtech Research Projects (FFG, Austria), Horizon 2020 Gender Flagging (European Commission, EU), and FONRID Innovation Projects (FONRID, Burkina Faso). These policies exemplify different formats of policies from research and innovation funders to foster inclusive gendered innovation.

Using a comparative case study approach, the research analyses how the four policies, embedded in diverse geographic and institutional contexts, have been implemented in practice by beneficiaries from BES, focusing on core challenges and strategies when applying for and implementing projects.

The findings of this research are available in two parts of the D3.10 deliverable.

This report focuses on the research and innovation funder (RFO) perspective. As designers of innovative funding policies, RFOs become core actors for changing the way how research and innovation are conducted. Policies promoting inclusive gendered innovation aim to change the narrative of innovating. Investigating how such policies have been implemented by beneficiaries provides insights about potential challenges and informs RFOs about the potential to optimise the policy design. In a second report, the focus is on beneficiaries and an ecosystem perspective (Karaulova et al, 2025). Moreover, individual case study reports provide additional detail and are published in the Zenodo repository of the INSPIRE project.