How to build more successful European collaborative projects in Bretagne? How to involve more SMEs in such consortiums? These questions have driven many local meetings in Bretagne during the INKREASE Interreg project. Boosting innovation capacities of companies lies on one of the top regional priorities. Facing the European top level calls for projects is an effective way to reach the goal.
In order to help companies to go on board, we imagined a network pooling the skills of the regional and local institutions and proposing common actions: a regional observatory of companies’ participation, training sessions in Brussels, customized support to join Horizon2020 and future Horizon Europe collaborative projects, and a regional database to look for additional competences…!
This action plan has been launched in 2019, some tasks are ongoing. Academic and Economic Regional agencies started to collect data so that the common observatory will be ready in 2021. A meeting to harmoniz their processes will be held in Spring 2020. The first regional seminary in Brussel is foreseen in March 2020 with trainings, workshops and actions of lobbying. A customized follow-up of IT security companies has been launched in September 2019, with the participation of the Cybersecurity French National Contact point. The network has set a list of 100 companies with a high potential of Horizon Europe participation in order to deliver them a specific information.
Lastly, the regional Craft platform is deepening European partnerships to share competencies of companies from common sectors, such as IT security, for which several regions (Central Finland, Wallonia, NRW,…) pooled their data. Craft also expanded in Agrifood sector with the data of 8 European Region to be added, regarding technology providers for the AgriFood Sector, Food Industries and Living Labs, RTOs, within the next years. Craft could then be used in S3 platforms such as Smart Sensors for AgriFood S3 platform, extended to almost 20 regions.
