Insights

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.

There is a multitude of opportunities in EU funding instruments for sustainable industries who are ready to reinvent and renew their business practices. Applying for EU funding is a long and competitive process but doing your homework will increase your company’s chances to succeed and reap the benefits of European collaboration for years to come. In this first part, we collected some key messages from a recent Business Finland webinar on European Union funding and collaboration. 

Fast Track to Innovation is a funding instrument to boost close-to-market innovation projects.

EuroNanoForum 2017 event concluded on 23^rd of June in Valletta, Malta after three successful conference and exhibition days that attracted participants from over 40 countries and brought nanotechnology and open innovations in focus to strengthen the competitiveness of European manufacturing industries. In addition to being a co-organiser of the event, Spinverse took an active participant role as well, with Managing Director Laura Koponen, headlining a plenary session on "nanotechnologies for industrial success".

The EU project IP4Plasma reached its finish line in the beginning of 2017 after three years of research and development. In the project, plasma equipment manufacturers and end-users worked with leading experts in research and technology innovation to bring cutting-edge IPR-protected innovations from the laboratory scale to industrial implementation for advanced surface treatment of materials. The project results are remarkable and include an advanced tuberculosis test, the development of a HIV detection test. new types of wound dressings with antibacterial properties and an improved sealing method for medical packaging.

Technology Industries of Finland organised a workshop that discussed the opportunities of EU's Horizon 2020 programme. Spinverse experts Markku Heino and Pirjo Pasanen were invited to give a talk on the topic. In their talk they emphasized that a company must first have a viable business idea, which can be developed into a 100 M€ business.

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:

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.

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%.