The project IoTBe will be proposed as a support action run by the consortium with the partners etventure, Fraunhofer IAIS, Faubourg Numérique, Acreo Swedish ICT and Challengy Israel. Our vision is to build a broad and vibrant ecosystem around the pilot projects that increase the collaboration between them, generates economic impact through new innovative business models and creates trust in the internet of things by transparent information about social challenges such as privacy and security implications. We will reach this vision by focussing on following five objectives: - We will support the collaboration and knowledge exchange between pilots and other relevant EU-projects (e.g. FIWARE). - We will build the bridge between pilots and relevant stakeholders (e.g. potential customers such as European small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), entrepreneurs and developers, but also researchers and policy makers) and thus expand the ecosystem further. - We will set the ground for upcoming business building activities by creating awareness and also by facilitating and fostering societal acceptance (e.g. by running a variety of innovation activities). - Building on the above mentioned developments we will set the ground for the development of concrete new customer-oriented businesses based on the emerging pilots. Those business models will be derived through a proven systematic user centric ideation and validation process increasing the market acceptance and success rate of these business models. The emerging new businesses shall have a substantial economic impact in Europe. - We will pave the way for future advances within IoT: We will write a whitepaper that explains, describes and collects the most promising future standards from pilots and distribute these to relevant parties. We will use the consortium existing academies for education activities (e.g. Fraunhofer academy or etventure Berlin School of Digital Business).

Lighthouse sets a standard on developing cross border connections within and beyond Europe. The project lights the way for startups within Europe by organising 8 Deep Dive Weeks in 4 ecosystems: Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon and the Baltics – meeting over 1600 different ecosystem players in specific themes such as fintech, refugee tech, e-gov, IoT, etc - and culminating with a Top 10 Lighthouse Award in London each year. Lighthouse will support directly over 120 startups to meet key people (investors, corporates, technological experts, media, customers, talent, etc.) in each of these ecosystems through matchmaking, 1-on-1 mentoring, workshops and many other activities. Furthermore, the best of the best of the selected startups will receive the chance to take part in our Europass programme - taking them to 8 of the biggest European tech events; as well as 1 week scouting missions to Silicon Valley, New York and Israel to accelerate their positioning as global players. Lighthouse’s top-notch support activities prepare startups to take advantage of the opportunities in external markets as well as providing qualified introductions to key players in new ecosystems: which all contributes to increased market success. In concrete expected impact, the project will help selected startups to obtain +2000 investment, partnership or customers leads, 500 new international customer leads, develop +100 adapted products/services to new markets, raise collective turnover by 50%, create +500 new jobs, raise +€50m in total investment and many more direct and serendipitous results. Lighthouse does not happen in a vacuum - its structure enables perfect integration with all Startup Europe activities - especially within Deep Dive Weeks. This exploits synergies between Lighthouse, Startup Europe and all related stakeholders by pooling resources together – encouraging even more ecosystems to take part in its activities.

WELCOME aims to connect 4 different major EU ecosystems (Berlin, Dublin, Milan and Madrid), identifying and engaging through WELCOME local partners the most relevant players of the previous 4 web entrepreneur (WE) ecosystems (investors, corporates, media, successful WEs) with prospective, emerging and successful startups. The final goal is to create a Pan-European ecosystem in which every WE in one of the ecosystems feels that belongs to it. WELCOME will run twice over a period of 2 years. There are 5 targets for WELCOME activities in the 4 ecosystems: • WP2. “Prospective wannabe entrepreneurs”, the goal is to impact on younger generations, woman and unemployed population and attract them to become active players in the ecosystems. • WP3. “Seed and early stage startups and investors”, the goal is to identify the emerging startups, investors (BAs, VCs), large & media corporates, media and in each local ecosystem and create connections and relationship cross-borders. The objective is not only to connect startups and investors, but also startups with other startups and build a cross-border investor network, supporting them to successfully launch their operations. • WP4. “Later stage startups and investors”, the objective is to identify the emerging stars in each local ecosystem and connect them with investors, corporates, and media in order to support them scale internationally within EU. • WP5: WELCOME will foster self-sustainability of their activities beyond the life of the project as well as collaboration with SE Initiative and other EU initiatives. • WP6: WELCOME will launch a media and a marketing campaign where the most interesting cases of EU Startups able to scale up will be presented to the public, by means of storytellings in relevant media Channels. The marketing campaign will be conducted by means of the WELCOME camper that will travel around the 4 ecosystems (displaying WELCOME logo).

Only 2 out of the top 20 companies changing lives and making money out of Big Data are European. Europe is not playing the role it should in the global market. European Data Incubator project aims to revert this situation. Every company is born as a startup, and Big Data has already proven to be a disruptive technology that can provide substantial changes in traditional and innovative domains. Many SMEs are facing a number of problems when attempting to develop a sort of comprehensive data strategy. The tools required to make successful data management an achievable prospect often require an up-front capital investment. The data remains in silos and its availability or cross-domain value is still unperceived. EDI will help them jump this hurdle providing (1) a free infrastructure with open source tools (2) training on the most known off-the-self solutions (3) support and business services to develop their business idea and (4) equity-free funding. The main objective of the project will be to leverage the technology and knowledge on Big Data across countries and sectors thanks to the incubation of start-ups/SMEs who use Big Data open source tools oriented to sort out major challenges in different business which facilitate their data assets. An experienced consortium will be behind EDI. It is comprised by experts on Big Data technologies, the managers of several acceleration initiatives within the FIWARE Accelerate programme, existing incubators like Deusto Entrepreneurship Centre and etventure Seed Lab and the largest online network for start-ups (F6S). Moreover, 16 data providers, from Finance, Transport, Industry 4.0, Retail, Media&Content, Energy, etc. will provide data to the incubation process. We expect to incubate around 120 companies under a 3-phase incubation programme (funnel approach) launching 3 call for proposals and disbursing up to €5M equity-free and commiting to raise additional financing resources up to €15M for them from private investors mainly.