Spinverse Senior Consultant Riikka Paasikivi has opened up the Horizon 2020 SME instrument in an article for the Finnish Kemia (Chemistry) magazine. The SME instrument is targeted at companies aiming for strong international growth and that bring to the markets new competitive products or solutions.
A part of developing more sustainable lifestyles is to extend the lifetime and foster re-use of items. Currently, acquiring second-hand items through peer-to-peer internet sites can be a time consuming and challenging process.
The New York Times article explains how the Nokia and Microsoft layoffs have created a surplus of unemployed tech workers in Finland and how there has been special effort in encouraging these workers to start their own companies. Specifically, the article mentions Quuppa, Creoir and Piceasoft, which are Spinverse Innovation Mill companies.
On 6 July, EC published the first results of Horizon 2020 including the statistics of the first 100 calls that closed by 1 December 2014. 36 732 proposals were evaluated by 9 325 experts and about 3 200 projects have been awarded a total of €5.5 billion in EU funding. The overall success rate was about 14% (down from 20% for the whole FP7). France and Belgium had the highest success rates (about 17%). 38% of successful applicants were newcomers, which is a great improvement compared to 13% in the last year of FP7. 40% of newcomers were SMEs and this helped to meet the target of 20% for SME participation (up from 16% in FP7). The SME Instrument introduced in H2020 turned out to be very popular and 5% of the 20% EU financial contribution to SMEs ended up coming from SME Instrument. The popularity - 4 694 new applications - caused the success rate of SME Instrument to plummet down to 7.3%.
The IP4Plasma project, funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme, aims to enable industrial innovations based on unique IP assets in plasma technology. During the project two e-learning courses have been designed and developed. One course is on “Basic facts on the fourth state of matter and its technical use” and the other on “Atmospheric pressure plasma surface treatment processes – facts and aspects interesting for managers”.
The new real-time measurement system brings extensive savings. Groundwork was laid in CLEEN and FIBIC’s joint BEST bioenergy research program, managed by Spinverse.
FIMECC’s Breakthrough Materials Doctoral School presented its latest results at the Manufacturing Performance Days (MPD) event in Tampere on June 10. This intensive research collaboration which already involves 37 doctoral works sets special focus on multiscale modelling and so called integrated computational materials engineering (ICME). New digital tools are used to build comprehensive understanding and to control material properties from microstructure to product design. This will speed up the product development and greatly improve the predictability of product endurance in demanding industrial applications.
Booxmedia Oy, with its' "End-to-End Cloud-TV Solution for Media Companies" and in Finland also well known for its DNA TV, is one of Spinverse's many successful Innovation Mill-projects. This Nokia spin-off has now been sold to British Amino Technologies.
Printed intelligence in Finland focuses on cost and energy efficient roll-to-roll manufacturing, advanced scalable materials and creation of new business.
The key is to combine materials and processing know-how with applications such as smart packaging, diagnostics, organic electronics, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), lighting and solar cells. These provide important enablers for the critical needs of flexible and organic electronics – already today.
Helsinki, 4 May 2015 - The European Commission’s research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 has granted EUR 17 million in funding for the Clean Energy From Ocean Waves (CEFOW) research project that is coordinated by Fortum, which Spinverse helped prepare and coordinate successfully.