Two hundred and three applications, twenty-four funded. That ratio, on its own, says more about the vitality, and the frustration, of the Canary Islands’ innovation ecosystem than any official press release could.
The Consejería de Universidades, Ciencia e Innovación y Cultura, through the Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información (ACIISI), published the resolution for the expanded PIRIS3 funding round on 11 August: five million euros in total, 85% co-financed by the FEDER Canarias 2021-2027 programme, going to twenty-four business projects. Moncloa reported the news, with figures confirmed by the Gobierno de Canarias’ own website and by La Voz de Lanzarote.
The jump from the year before is stark. In 2025 the same funding line supported ten initiatives with a two-million-euro budget. In 2026 that budget more than doubled to five million and used up the entire available credit, a sign, according to the regional minister, of a business community with real capacity to propose innovative projects, one that’s outgrowing what the regional budget can currently support.
The twenty-four funded projects span areas central to the Canary Islands’ Smart and Sustainable Specialisation Strategy, known as the expanded RIS3: artificial intelligence, industrial digitalisation, energy transition, blue economy, health, sustainability, mobility, smart tourism and technology for the primary sector. It’s a broad spread, reflecting the regional government’s stated attempt to gradually steer the Canarian economy away from near-total dependence on tourism, without abandoning it.
That’s not a small detail for an outermost European region like the Canary Islands, where research and development spending has traditionally lagged the Spanish national average. FEDER funds remain the main tool for closing that gap, and this year’s fast pace of execution, with the budget exhausted quickly, points to private-sector demand outstripping the public funding on offer.
A medium-term question remains open, though. The grants must be executed within the 2021-2027 programming period, which makes new funding rounds likely before that deadline, but uncertainty over the European Union’s next multiannual financial framework adds pressure to the regional timetable. If the number of applications keeps growing at this rate, the real question for next year won’t be whether to expand the budget, but by how much.
For now, the 24 selected projects mark a concrete signal for an archipelago trying to build an economic identity less tied to tourist arrivals and more grounded in knowledge. Whether that’s enough to genuinely reshape the islands’ productive structure is something only time, and the results of future funding rounds, will tell.
