The objective of the project is to design, develop and implement a capacity-building strategy to increase the capacity of the financial ecosystem and its participants in South, Central and Eastern European countries for provision and absorption of alternative forms of financing (AF) for innovative SMEs Sub objectives and outputs: 1: To map and analyse the framework conditions and establish the capacity-building strategy and implementation plan • Capacity building strategy and implementation plan for South and Central and Eastern Europe, in particular PT, ES, IT, LT, PL, SK, HU, RO, UA (consortium presence), GR, LT, SLa, CZ, HR, BG, RS; BA, AL, MK (consortium outreach) • Validation with 120 participants • Adapted strategy and plan in line with assessment 2: To provide cross-European information architecture with materials, resources and online tools for capacity building and matching of innovative SMEs to AF schemes and their providers • ALTFInator web platform with interactive library and information, matching and data exchange tool set: 3: To engage and broaden the stakeholder community, complemented by equal increase of knowledge, capacity and partnerships in support of provision and absorption of AF for innovative SMEs • Awareness raising campaigns focusing on 3 600 key stakeholders • 8 national workshops with 240 participants • 2 international best practice workshops with 60 participants • 8 public roundtables with 40 participants each • Policy makers hearing at the EuroParl with 30 participants. • MOOCs for AF providers with 500 participants • 4 webinars for group coaching of SMEs with 120 participants 4: To review the impact of the implementation and provide the evidence-base for adaption and sustainability of the scheme in the light of experience • KPI´s 5: To provide stakeholders at European and International level, with the information concerning the ALTFInator activities, events, achievements, respective web platform, material and tools • Outreach to 100.

Promising ICT project results obtained in the course of H2020/FP7/CIP programmes are expected to lead to innovative solutions in fields like Energy, Life Sciences, Health, Ambient Intelligence, Transport, Industry 4.0, SmartCities, etc. However, most of results are early stage disruptive innovations from technology and/or applications point of view. If their potential economic impact is attractive, they face challenges before reaching any commercial exploitation and require specialised support. IRSUS will bridge the gaps faced by innovators (research teams, SMEs, spinoffs & startups) to reach the market with a feasible, viable and attractive business case and strategy for users, clients, partners and investors. IRSUS will create value to support innovators through the road to market.170 promising ICT innovations coming from research projects and detected by the Innovation Radar methodology by the EC will directly benefit from IRSUS activities, to successfully drive their way to markets and to reach commercial exploitation. IRSUS consortium will: 1 Introduce business-related elements into the core of the innovators 2 Provide them with training, partnering and individual/group business support services (mentoring, private&public funding, support to licensing, etc). Services will be strengthen with external specialised actors, e.g. business coaches or corporate funds. Ready for investment innovators will be introduced to our Advisory Board of Investors. 3 Connect innovators with already existing public & private initiatives to maximize the quality and quantity of delivered services. 4 Raise awareness on innovations to make an impact on the whole European R&I ecosystem. The complementary consortium partners include expertise in value creation of R&I results, business & entrepreneurship, EU projects & funding sources and cover the whole EU geography (ZABALA and IESE Business School in Spain; innomine in Hungary, DOCOMO Digital in Italy; etVenture Startup Hub in Germany).

“BRIEFING – Bridging the FET Innovation Gap“ facilitates the translation of European research excellence into tangible innovative potential and therefore contributes to the renewal of the basis for future European competitiveness and growth. BRIEFING leverages different ways of exploiting FET research by supporting researchers in their innovation exploration and fostering the connection between the worlds of researchers and different business stakeholder groups. In this respect, the proposal addresses sub-topic "b. FET Innovation" of the FET Open CSA Call. BRIEFING is based on a flexible system of support tools and services that allows for a tailor-made approach to the diverse needs of the different stakeholder groups. In order to ensure this, the range of support services that will be offered to FET researchers can be specifically tailored to the individual demands and includes business and communication trainings as well as matchmaking tools and events, which altogether will be administered through a dedicated online marketplace. The BRIEFING consortium provides the manifold expertise to respond to the diverse stakeholder needs, bringing together innovation service providers backed by large SME networks with a renowned research institution. The partners’ experiences span the provision of innovation services and the dynamisation of innovation ecosystems as well as the involvement of relevant stakeholders from the research and business world. Three subcontracting clusters will append additional business expertise and involvement in key industries.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is essential for the digitalization of the manufacturing sector; notwithstanding, less than 25% of the manufacturing companies in Europe profit from ICT-enabled solutions. In order to democratically boost the competitiveness of the European manufacturers (especially Small and Medium-sized Enterprises - SMEs), innovative solutions need to consider technological and commercial scalability from the beginning. From this perspective, the cloudification of services has become the ideal enabler in the manufacturing digitalization. Successful European initiatives such us CloudFlow, cloudSME or Fortissimo have demonstrated the benefits of cloudification for engineering services, by means of combining HPC resources, computational tools, and cloud computing platforms. Manufacturing SMEs are empowered to compute and solve problems that cannot be tackled without cloud and HPC technology, making them more competitive by reducing development times for innovative product with better performance. The results of these initiatives are fostering the engineering and to some extend the prototyping processes within the manufacturing workflow; however, monitoring and optimizing production processes have not yet greatly benefited from an integrated information workflow and simulation loop based on on-line factory data. The core partners of CloudFlow (eu-cloudflow.eu) and cloudSME (cloudsme.eu) are joining forces to leverage factory data with cloud-based engineering tools: a) paving the way toward manufacturing analytics, b) enriching the manufacturing engineering process with on-line data, and c) simulating and optimizing the production process with the vision to support it in real-time. The consolidated platform between CloudFlow and cloudSME with extended capabilities to process factory data is going to be accessed through a central interface, enabling the stakeholders to interact, and collaborate.

NEANIAS is an ambitious project that comprehensively addresses the ‘Prototyping New Innovative Services’ challenge set out in the recent ‘Roadmap for EOSC’ foreseen actions. NEANIAS will drive the co-design, delivery, and integration into EOSC of innovative thematic services, derived from state-of-the-art research assets and practices in three major sectors: underwater research, atmospheric research and space research. Each of these sectors engages a diverse set of research and business groups, practices, and technologies. Each thematic service will not only address its community-specific needs but will also enable the transition of the respective community to the EOSC concept and Open Science principles. In doing so, NEANIAS provides its communities with plentiful resource access, collaboration instruments, and interdisciplinary research mechanisms, which will amplify and broaden each community’s research and knowledge generation activities. From a technological perspective, NEANIAS will deliver a rich set of services that are designed to be flexible and extensible; they will be able to accommodate the needs of communities beyond their original definition and to adapt to neighboring cases, fostering reproducibility and re-usability. From a sustainability perspective, NEANIAS identifies promising, cutting-edge business cases across several user communities and lays out several concrete exploitation opportunities.