Insights

Sometimes companies who have first succeeded in securing public funding for their own R&D&I project may find themselves being further funded as a part of a large European consortium tackling global challenges. This is where Spinverse’s customer SSH Communications Security succeeded. We talked to Jussi Mononen of this Finnish cybersecurity company on the differences and benefits of applying funding as an individual company to being part of a large consortium. 

The newly launched National Battery Strategy strengthens Finland’s role as a competitive, competent and sustainable player in the international battery industry. Spinverse collaborated with Gaia Consulting to provide their collective expertise on the battery strategy work for the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment.

Spinverse is one of the nine partners in the STARDUST project, launched in 2017, to create a miniaturised neurosurgical implant leading to a proof-of-concept for a new treatment approach for Parkinson’s disease. The four-year project has now progressed to its final year, coming a few steps closer to introduce novel ways to treat a wide variety of diseases.

The European Commission recently funded AICCELERATE, a multiparty project aiming to develop AI solutions to improve patient care and hospital processes. The goal of the “AI ACCELERATOR – a Smart Hospital Care Pathway Engine” project is to demonstrate the scalability of the AI solutions for different types of healthcare use cases. The project consortium led by Helsinki University Hospital (HUS) consists of 16 partners from eight European countries.

Since its launch in 2017, Spinverse has been an active facilitator for the partners of CleverHealth Network that develops top-class health tech solutions to solve clinical challenges to support patients, care personnel and clinical researchers. eCare for Me is one of the subprojects of the ecosystem where Helsinki University Hospital (HUS) nephrologist Virpi Rauta and HUS Chief researcher and Head physician Kimmo Porkka lead their respective research activities together with a group of clinicians, technology companies and university researchers. We asked Virpi and Kimmo how the projects are progressing.

The Chalmers researcher Kasper Moth-Poulsen's unique solar energy system, MOST, has been granted just over 4.3 M€ in funding from the prestigious EU programme, Future Emerging Technologies (FET) within the Horizon 2020 framework. "This project would not have been possible without IMCG's professional help. IMCG was involved from the start and helped me to identify funding options, how to find good partners, how to structure the project and how to present all this in the proposal," Kasper says.

Spinverse recently helped the Norwegian start-up sensiBel in securing the 2.5 M€ grant and 4.2 M€ equity from the EIC Accelerator instrument. The funding will assist sensiBel in their goal to finalise their product development and scale up the manufacturing of their unique optical Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) microphone. With the accelerated manufacturing, sensiBel will be able to satisfy the needs for better high-performance microphone technology in voice-controlled user interfaces, high-fidelity audio recordings and sound capture markets.

The CleverHealth Network ecosystem is buzzing with activity as the ongoing six co-development projects aim to develop new treatments and solutions to address clearly defined clinical challenges. The product and service innovations under development will use extensive and high-quality health care data of the Helsinki University Hospital (HUS). The projects are characterized by close-knit, multidisciplinary cooperation between HUS clinicians, research institutes and leading health technology and ICT companies.

The CHARM ECSEL JU project coordinated by Valmet aims to develop industrial IoT solutions with an improved tolerance towards harsh industrial surroundings. Digitalisation of the European manufacturing industries is the key to their continuous renewal and competitiveness. Harsh environmental conditions in manufacturing processes and end user environment may slow down the opportunities brought by IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence). The CHARM project is set to solve this challenge.

Business Finland launched a competition in early 2020 for leading companies (so called Veturi companies) with international operations to challenge them to solve significant future problems and increase their research, development and innovation investments in Finland. Four leading companies with three projects were announced as the winners of the competition. Nokia, one of the four winning companies will launch a project called “Unlocking Industrial 5G” which allows the company to innovate new products, services and solutions in Finland and develop and commercialise them together with the companies in the local ecosystem.