Insights

The PeptiCaps project develops a novel nanotechnology for the delivery of specific active ingredients in skin care application.

According to the annual CTO-Survey, Finnish technology companies are preparing for digitalisation. It is believed that digitalisation will create new business models and ways to accelerate the development of current business. New business is needed, as the survey results reveal a concern for public funding cutbacks and poor predictability of Finnish and EU legislators.

Martin Curley of Intel Corporation, Marcel Wubbolts of Royal DSM and Jonathan O’Halloran of QuantuMDx have been awarded as European CTOs of the Year. All three are inspiring leaders who have paid special attention to sustainability and the creation of strong and broad technology collaboration communities. Based on their foresighted technology leadership, Europe has reached the forefront in three very different industries.

Highlighting a sample of successful projects: from research, through piloting and demonstration, to innovations and business growth:

From now until 2020, the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme will grant nearly €80 billion funding to innovation projects. Here are 7 reasons why your project should consider Horizon 2020 funding:

The Horizon 2020 Work Programme for 2016-2017 has been published with over 1000 different funding opportunities for R&D&I, demonstrations, piloting and new market entry in very many different areas. This is the time to start looking for funding opportunities for you if you haven't done so already.

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%.