What We Do
SMEs and Intermediary Organisations
The Vanguard Initiative offers a platform for businesses, clusters and knowledge institutes to meet and join forces in finding new innovative solutions.
Together, we aim to increase the competitiveness of companies and scale-up regional businesses in Europe-wide value-chains.
The Vanguard Initiative’s Pilot Projects offer unique possibilities for businesses, clusters, and knowledge centres to connect with like-minded partners across European regions that share a joint goal; to strengthen industrial innovation in Europe. The benefits of interregional partnerships, established through the Pilot Projects, include exploiting complementarities, project development at the demonstration and piloting stage towards upgrading and business exploitation (beyond TRL 5), opening and sharing specialised infrastructure, access to a larger community of end-users, pooling good practices as well as jointly addressing non-technological issues, etc.
The participating stakeholders in the Pilot Projects get access to exclusive networks of pilot plants, demo-sites, and partners, working together to accelerate the market uptake of advanced technologies and methodologies in areas of strategic importance to Europe’s industry.
SME success stories
In these unprecedented times, SMEs across Europe are facing profound transformation processes in which the technological challenges are becoming ever greater and, at the same time, the need of embracing the twin (digital and green) transition needs to be tackled quickly and decisively. Therefore, a strong positioning on the national and international market is a crucial success factor for small and medium-sized enterprises. External support through cooperations can be an important factor, but these are rarely free or without strings attached.
The Vanguard Initiative and its initiated SME Success Stories support program precisely tackles these challenges. Three Enterprises (AddCat B.V., Remembrane Srl. and Bond High-Performance 3D Technology) have been selected and supported by building cross-regional innovation practices. The program aimed to promote the participation of these companies in the activities of the Vanguard Initiative in order to foster interregional value chains and accelerate market adoption of their products and services.
The selected companies not only benefited from the strong network and experience of the Vanguard Initiative experts, but were also able to stimulate and expand interregional partnerships and collaborations in the Vanguard regions through an innovation voucher.
Read more about our voucher winners in our dedicated news features.
ADMA Energy Pilot moving forward with new project areas
The ADMA Energy pilot is currently advancing the development of priority project areas identified in 2019 and 2020 as new demonstration cases within the Pilot.
Updates from the Bioeconomy Pilot: new demo-case and contributions to the Green Deal
The latest updates from the Vanguard Initiative's Bioeconomy Pilot includes the launch of a new demo-case on biopolymers production.
3DP Pilot implements process to ensure the Pilot’s agility, readability and resource efficiency
Over the last months, extensive efforts have been made to continuously adapt the 3DP Pilot activities to emerging industrial needs.
Successful webinar organised on 3DP Pan EU-related opportunities
3DP PAN EU is the European Parliament supported project making transparent towards SMEs the equipment and service offer of 3D-printing test and demonstration facilities throughout the EU.
Register now: online international cluster-to-cluster meeting 10 June
On 10th June, the Emilia-Romagna Cluster Network and ART-ER is organizing an online cluster-to-cluster meeting.
Vanguard member South Tyrol selected as lighthouse project by Mission Innovation
The Hydrogen Valley South Tyrol is one of 40 lighthouse projects that have been selected by the Mission Innovation as a particularly successful project.