Teaching Factories Competition (TFC) 2025 is a collaborative initiative bringing together corporates and academia across Europe through business challenges.

EIT Manufacturing invites companies to propose relevant industrial challenges and higher education and VET students to form solver teams (4-6 members) to ideate solutions to those challenges.

By fostering academia-industry partnerships, the TFC aims to stimulate the development of dynamic solutions to industrial challenges.

Duration: The competition will span for approximately three months

Coaching & Training: Solver Teams will have coaching and training sessions to guide them during the competition phase and support them in implementing the solutions.

Submission:

The call is organized in one single submision for companies and 2 cut-off dates submissions for solvers team.

Interested applicants can have more information and submit a proposal through the following website: https://www.eitmanufacturing.eu/calls/teaching-factories-competition-2025-call-overview/

Evaluation:

The eligibility check and evaluation of applications will be conducted in 2 phases:

1. Application phase:

Companies: EIT Manufacturing will perform an eligibility check on the companies’ challenges to check their alignment with the conditions presentedin the call guidelines.

EIT Manufacturing will decide which challenge to allocate for the first cut-off stage and which for the second cut-off and publish the catalogue of challenges accordingly.

Solver Teams will be able to scroll through the catalogue of challenges and submit applications to multiple challenges (one application/challenge). EIT Manufacturing will perform an eligibility check and an evaluation of the Solver Teams applications.

The evaluation of Solver Teams will be run by one EIT Manufacturing internal expert and one independent external expert and up to four Solver Teams might be selected per challenge.

The exact number of challenges and Solver Teams will depend on the number and quality of the received challenges and applications.

2. Competition phase: Solver Teams will implement their proposed solutions. After the implementation phase, a jury of three independent external experts will evaluate each team’s performance during the online pitch session: The jury will select the top three winning teams in each category

a) Higher Education Solver Teams and

b) VET (Vocational Education and Training) Solver Teams.

The top three winning Solver Teams in each category will receive financial prizes. Additionally, representatives of the challenge owners will receive two courtesy tickets to EIT Manufacturing networking events and/or access to online training of their choice.