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According to the recently published statistics from the European Commission, 50 innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from 14 countries have been selected in the latest round of Horizon2020 SME Instrument Phase 2. This time Spain stole the crown with 14 accepted projects, while Finland took fourth spot with 5, after Germany and France with 8 and 6 respectively.
Following the universal tendency, the European Union is striving to achieve ambitious energy and climate targets by 2020, including 10% requirement of renewable fuels in the transport sector. In many of those energy conservation measures and in terms of efficiency of energy use, Finland numbers among the leading countries in the world. Finland relies heavily on the energy efficiency as the source of most of the country’s cleantech business value.
Bioenergy – a renewable energy derived from biomass – is playing a vital role in many geographical areas. Currently, it is estimated to provide around 10% of the world’s primary energy supply.
In accordance with a global trend, Finland is acknowledged for its long and successful history in bioenergy, especially in forest biomass-based solutions. The high performance in turn has been enabled by innovative technology and engineering solutions as well as strong supporting research sector.
As Spinverse continues to experience rapid growth and increasing demand for its innovation consulting services, two new players reinforce the team.
Ilari Kallio, Vice President R&D from Wärtsilä and Antti Nivala, Founder and CTO from M-Files have been elected as the Finland's CTO of the Year 2016 awardees. The CTO of the Year title is awarded annually to a CTO who has had a positive impact on the growth and technology of the CTO’s company, acts as an inspiring leader, and has an active role in the society.
Spinverse advises Kaidi, one of China’s leading renewable energy producers, to plan a biofuel refinery investment project, an investment of one billion euros to Finland. The second generation biofuel refinery is planned to be built in Ajos, Kemi. The technology used in the biorefinery is globally unique and the planned facility will prove that high-quality biodiesel can be produced from woody biomass.
Spinverse has been chosen to coordinate the BEAM – Business with impact programme. The Spinverse coordination team is led by Juha Miettinen, an experienced international innovation policy and instrument professional with nearly 20 years of experience in innovation systems development and innovation support, technology transfer & business development.
The PeptiCaps project develops a novel nanotechnology for the delivery of specific active ingredients in skin care application.
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.
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.