Knowledge and Innovation Agenda Mission-Driven Innovation: Review 2025 and outlook for 2026

2025 was a dynamic year for the Knowledge and Innovation Agenda Mission-Driven Innovation (KIA MV).

The Ministry of Economic Affairs announced that the top sector approach will be discontinued at the end of 2025. Although the top sector policy as an overarching framework will be phased out, the Top Consortia for Knowledge and Innovation (TKIs)—including TKI CLICKNL—will remain in place. Within the Mission-driven Innovation Policy, which runs until 2027, CLICKNL will continue to be responsible for the Knowledge and Innovation Agenda Mission-Driven Innovation. Over the coming two years, CLICKNL’s focus will increasingly centre on this knowledge and innovation agenda.

In this context, we continued in 2025 to strengthen knowledge and innovation through our transdisciplinary research programmes. The NWO call Values in Transitions resulted in three projects this year, developed in collaboration between knowledge institutions, companies and societal organisations.

In addition, the Adaptivity in Transitions call is currently under development. This call will open in early 2026 and focuses on developing insights, perspectives for action and capacities for action to increase the adaptivity of actors and systems within transitions. The cross-over call with the Knowledge and Innovation Agenda Circular Economy, Consumer Behaviour for a Circular System Transition, also opened.

The KIEM MV call resulted in a total of 83 projects in 2025. In these short-term research projects, SMEs bring their innovation questions to knowledge institutions, with a strong emphasis on the deployment of design capacity across various societal challenges. In 2026, another KIEM MV call will follow in collaboration with the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA, focusing on scaling innovative impact entrepreneurship.

The results of the various projects have been analysed and translated into examples on the Knowledge and Innovation Agenda Mission-Driven Innovation website. In addition, these insights were translated into the magazine Dát maakt impact, in which eight changemakers reflect on what they believe creates impact and in which concrete tools for achieving impact are explored.

We also continued to build the Mission-Driven Innovation community, including through two events. The aim of these activities is to strengthen connections within the community and with stakeholders in the thematic challenges, such as Health, Agriculture and Safety.

For 2026, the Knowledge and Innovation Agenda Mission-Driven Innovation is opting for a further refinement of its focus. Through a design process with key stakeholders—both at the core of the agenda and within the challenges to which it contributes—it was decided to place even greater emphasis on Mission-Driven Innovation as a crucial connector within the Dutch mission-driven innovation landscape.

In the coming years, we will commit even more explicitly to ensuring that urgent societal challenges—requiring an integrated approach to people, technology and systems—lead to broadly supported and sustainable solutions. We do so by bringing together specific expertise on human behaviour, organisational structures and societal processes, connecting and unlocking this expertise, and making it practically applicable within the thematic KIAs. This is supported by the deployment of relevant tools, approaches and methodologies (KEMs).