Astropreneurs: turning space-related ideas into viable businesses and promoting opportunities for entrepreneurs coming from space and non-space sectors. We will support entrepreneurs, startups and SMEs, coming from space and non-space sectors, to create viable business cases and have faster markets approaches by mentoring them on businesses and technical needs, helping them to access private and public funding, but also to overcome the financial, administrative and networking barriers that are now preventing them from more success in the commercial phases. Astropreneurs consortium is solid and sustainable, even at its constitution level. All partners, led by Instituto Pedro Nunes – Portugal, are spread across Europe and represent different types of stakeholders: Verhaert (BE), Brimatech Services GmbH (AT), Science and Technology Facilities Council – STFC (UK), Aerospace Valley (FR), Centrum für Satellitennavigation Hessen – CESAH (DE), CzechInvest (UK), and Knowledge Innovation Market – KIM (SP). The complementarity of skills and expertise gathered in the CSA, aligned with the unmatched geographical reach is a powerful differentiating characteristic of the consortium, together with the direct participation of the ESA BIC Network & ESA Brokers Network.

The EU faces huge challenges in food security, sustainable agriculture, marine and maritime and inland water management. Blue Growth solutions can play an important role in meeting these challenges and unlock the potential of oceans and inland water for the benefit of European competitiveness. Blue Growth is identified as a key emerging industry to be supported via inter cluster collaboration as well as a key driver for the EU economy. NEPTUNE aims at developing new cross-sectoral and cross-border industrial value-chains, including notably SMEs, to foster the development of Blue Growth industries in Europe and beyond. This will be based on the construction or reconfiguration of value chains driven by the integration of new technologies and know-how between Water, Aerospace, ICT and Agriculture industries. NETPUNE addresses in particular three key aspects of Blue Growth that have a great potential to benefit from such collaboration and SME innovation support: (i) Water management in urban and rural environments; (ii) Fluvial and maritime transport and port logisitics; (iii) Environment and renewable marine energy. From a methodological perspective, NEPTUNE focuses on two main concepts: the innovative Open Space Platform that refers to the collaborative space and innovation animation techniques via a project emergence methodology that helps SMEs and other stakeholders to identify market trends and opportunities and support the incubation of Blue Growth projects and innovation ideas. NEPTUNE expects to support at least 100 SMEs for the development of 40 new innovative solutions. NEPTUNE brings together 10 of Europe’s leading clusters from 7 countries and 2 additional innovation, creativity and inter-cluster expert organisations to implement this ambitious project.

The focus of Cross4Health is to move beyond the state-of-the-art practice of regional clusters to unlock the collaborative potential of the SMEs from Aerospace, Biotechnology, Energy, ICT and Medical Devices (ABEIM) sectors in generating innovative solutions, business models and work-flows that enhance patient-centered personalized care for societal challenges in health, delivered through the Medical Devices new emerging industry value chains. By providing a framework for a more structured cross-sectoral and cross-border collaboration, that manages all the complex reactions within the process, Cross4Health instantiates the mechanisms to ensure the long-term sustainability of the action. The main outcome of the Cross4Health project will be a portfolio of innovative services, processes and products conceived in an intelligent ‘plug-in’ platform for ABEIM stakeholders by high performance crossover teams. This will increase the competitiveness of the SMEs, advancing the positioning of European countries in this new emerging market. All these will be achieved by pursuing the following project objectives: • Establishing Open Innovation Spaces where all the involved parties set the priorities and the challenges. • Generating added value, leveraging expert knowledge, new partnerships and market support by providing targeted monetary (competitive grants) and non-monetary (innovation vouchers) support mechanisms. • Facilitating fast testing and business hypothesis validation via large-scale demonstrators. • Facilitating sustainability by validating complementary funding streams and alignment with RIS3 strategies. Cross4Health Vision is to work towards the osmosis of technologies, culture, teams and businesses among the selected sectors, tearing down the blocking barriers to realize significant advances in Health, growth and employment for new and/or improved products, services and processes.