The ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) initiative was launched by the EC on July 2013 with an initial budget of 77 million Euro. During its first stage, I4MS has shown substantial success and contributed to the progressive development of European SMEs adopting advanced ICT solutions for manufacturing. The initiative has already achieved some of the main goals resulting from the interaction with SMEs through the successful launch of open calls that generated a high participation of SMEs, many of them newcomers to EU R&D funding programs. The actual stage of the projects involved in I4MS brings the need for enhanced support and specific actions towards their exploitation success and towards better leveraging the European Manufacturing Sector through the implementation of ICT solutions within the Manufacturing SMEs. Four additional projects have joined the initiative, these projects will need to integrate in the initiative and have same services of support as the projects included in the first phase of I4MS, such as open calls support, etc… For this purpose, I4MS-Growth has designed different strategies that will among others: • Renew the I4MS Portal with improved areas for providing information of interest to: regional entities, competence centers, SMEs, etc… • Enable the interchange of synergies between IPs and IAs involved in the initiative • Support the interaction with the I4MS Competence Centre Network; • Continue to promote and support the involvement of SMEs in the new launch of open calls for IAs; • Reinforce the brand and image of the Competence Centers Network of Excellence as well as their interaction with innovation hubs; • Facilitate the dissemination of the experiments for a future replication and implementation of the I4MS scheme within the regions; • Position the I4MS initiative as one of the key initiatives in Europe for the Manufacturing and ICT sector. • Administrative management of innovation hubs.

The worldwide economic downturn forces the Western companies to cut costs and enhances the performances of their processes in order to maintain the European leadership and excellence in manufacturing. Effectively, European businesses cannot compete anymore on workforce costs with Eastern countries: as a result the manufacturers have to leverage on more sustainable and efficient production systems. In this scenario ICT has represented, throughout the years, the crucial enabler for preserving competitiveness and fostering industry innovation. In particular, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a breakthrough research area for ICT in manufacturing and represents also the new innovation frontier for accomplishing the EU2020 “smart everywhere” vision. Thus, an important factor for a successful innovation strategy is a more aware and widespread use of the CPS engineering in the manufacturing environment to ensure a competitive advantage for business success and jobs creation. sCorPiuS investigates, in particular, the role of CPS as a lever to empower manufacturing performance and proposes the creation of a roadmap capable to preempting the most important technological trends. Therefore, the project purpose is to support the planning of the Research and Innovation activities with the involvement of the most important European stakeholders. In addition, the dissemination of the project activities is crucial for the success of the project and for the sustainability of its outputs in the long term, the principle behind is that collaboration is the enabler of innovation. For these reasons, one of the main objectives of sCorPiuS is to perform activities for creating consensus, community building and awareness within the targeted communities of the European Union.

The objective of Morpheos is to create in EU a centralized open ecosystem based on consumer morphology where creative enterprises can have access to knowledge about customers expectations and need (“customization knowledge” in the following) to enhance their creativity and design processes. It will address the needs of EU creative SME manufacturers, consumers and creative web developers and entrepreneurs. Based on the analysis of actual solutions limits, Morpheos offers a different disruptive approach, exploiting actually available KET (smart mobile, 4G broadband), open ecosystem approach and social interaction not possible in the past. Specific objectives are: deployment of MORPHEOS PLATFORM for item suggestion based on unique identification of the customer and morphotype DB, in form of plug&play addons for major e-commerce platforms (Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, Prestashop) to be affordable, accessible to SMEs and fit for high design goods produced in EU; SMARTHPONE AND MOBILE MEASURE COLLECTION exploiting in commercial environment mobile camera potential to collect consumer measures, fully integrated with the addons; refinement, validation and implementation of the self-learning MATCHER algorithm for item personalized indication; DEMO AND SCALE-UP use in operational environment, paving the way to commercial exploitation; creation of a standardized unique BIG DATA of morphotypes of all geographical groups of on-line world consumers and products; the MORPHEOS ECOSYSTEM ready for third party additional solutions and apps by web entrepreneurs to exploit the potential of the sw with new functionalities and to expand its use to other sectors. The final objective is to realize a “beta” version of the platform and of add-ons for the major ecommerce platforms, validated in real business environment by SME vendor end users and consumers in fashion and interior design sectors, to prove the validity of the solution in 2 major creative EU manufacturing sectors.

The objective of the SOMATCH is to improve the competitiveness of EU SMEs in Textile and Clothing (T&C) and design focused sectors by the collection, definition and visualization by ad hoc interfaces of fashion trends. SOMATCH will provide creative designers with detailed and reliable trends estimations and forecasts of user acceptance. Its goal will be achieved by the creation of an innovative tool for the mining and visualization of large sets of unstructured data, related to the use and preferences of fashion products by consumers, supporting T&C companies quick reaction to the market dynamics and better adaptation of design to real consumers’ demand. SOMATCH faces this complex and challenging deal by the combined development and application of SoA advanced image analysis technology, unexploited and innovative in clothing and fashion, combined with social network analysis. Its results will be presented to interested end users by dedicated interfaces and instruments: mobile devices as well as ad hoc visualization tools will be explored for this purpose. The visualisation of the generated data will be performed from off-line statistics, generated after data processing, and by new real-time instruments for image collection and evaluation of designs. They will be targeted also by the integration of the systems with new SoA mobile and wearable (for ex. Google Glass) devices to collect information and to visualise trend interpretation. This approach will open a vast field of new approaches for the fashion designers, supporting final users involvement into the whole trend evaluation and a close interaction with them. To reach this purpose Somatch consortium includes research centres expert in image and content analysis (TUM, UPC), software providers experts in data management, platform development and fashion tools (Holonix. Sparsity, Ideal), end users from SME textile industry and retail (DENA) and social networking and e-commerce (Weblogs, NJAL).