What are contributing partners?
The ‘contributing partner’ category was created with the goal of opening up IHI to a wide range of health stakeholders who may want to invest in IHI without becoming full members. As the name suggests, contributing partners invest their own resources (which can be researchers’ time, laboratories, data) or cash in a specific IHI project or projects. Their contributions work in a similar way to contributions by industry partners.
The contributing partner category builds on the associated partner status created under the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2) programme, the fore-runner to IHI. By the end of the IMI2 programme, there were over 30 IMI2 associated partners from around the world including philanthropic organisations, patient groups, and companies. They are contributing to IMI2 projects in diverse fields such as diabetes, infectious diseases (including tuberculosis and Ebola), digital health, autism, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and more.
Who can become a contributing partner?
Any country, international organisation or legal entity that wants to contribute to the IHI objectives can apply to become an IHI contributing partner, as long as it is not a member or affiliate of one of the IHI industry partners (i.e. COCIR, EFPIA including Vaccines Europe, EuropaBio, and MedTech Europe).
What are the benefits of being an IHI contributing partner?
Leverage funding: In many cases, contributions from contributing partners can be matched by EU contributions. In total, the EU can match up to EUR 200 million from contributing partners. Becoming an IHI contributing partner is an excellent way to make your resources stretch further while sharing risks.
Influence research: As an investor in a project, you will be able to influence it from the earliest stages.
Networking: As an IHI contributing partner, you will be part of the wider collaborative health innovation ecosystem that we are creating. In your project(s), you will work in a neutral, pre-competitive space alongside experts from industry, universities, patient groups, regulators and others, giving you unprecedented opportunities to learn from them (and vice-versa).
Benefits of scale: IHI expects to launch ambitious, large-scale, cross-sector projects addressing major challenges in health research. Working at scale in this way increases the likelihood of the projects having a real impact.
How can we become a contributing partner?
If you want to become a contributing partner, you should first read our a guide for contributing partners which describes the application process in detail, and sets out how the contributing partner system works in practice in terms of things like contractual obligations and reporting requirements.
Based on the information in the guide, you should prepare a letter of application to be sent to the IHI Governing Board. The letter should outline the scope of the proposed partnership with IHI, and in particular detail the proposed contribution to the topic in terms of activities, resources and funding to be allocated over the lifetime of the project. To facilitate the preparation of these letters, we have created template application letters for new contributing partners:
Single-stage calls: Word 
or PDF 
We recommend that you contact the IHI Programme Office and send us a draft of your letter to ensure it contains the information that the Governing Board needs to assess your application.
Note
Before applying to become a contributing partner to IHI – please check that your organisation is not affiliated to an IHI private member, that is COCIR, EFPIA (including Vaccines Europe), EuropaBio and MedTech Europe.
IHI private members, their constituent and affiliated entities may not apply to become IHI contributing partners.
The websites of our private members include the lists of their corporate members, national associations and other entities which are the constituent and affiliated entities of the private members.