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.
3DP PAN EU contributing to combat Covid-19 crisis
3DP PAN EU is an EU-wide, web-based matchmaking tool connecting supply and demand in the field of 3D-printing.
ADMA Pilot updates January - April 2020
With the completion of the NeSSIE project in 2019 and the Pilot Action on Sens
3D-printing Pilot gathered for online plenary meeting on 2 April
On April 2nd, the 3D-printing (3DP) Pilot of the Vanguard Initiative held its 11th Plenary Meeting.
New project funded by European Union’s Maritime and Fisheries Fund with links to ADMA Energy Pilot
To address the demand for lower costs and need to secure competitive advantages through digitalization in the area of offshore windfarms, the project “Scaling-up Digitalization Of
3DP Pan EU project launches matchmaking tool and call for SMEs
The 3DP Pan EU project is a project developed by Vanguard Initiative’s 3D Printing pilot, enabled by funding from the European Parliament.
Launch of new digital bioeconomy platform
The Bioeconomy Pilot and the Biobased Industry Consortium (BIC) work closely together and exchange information concerning the biobased industries’ topics and the Bioeconomy Pilot’s cases for joint