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.
ESM and Bioeconomy Pilots successful in TAF-applications
Technical Assistance Facility (TAF), launched by the European Commission as a tool to support Smart Specialisation Platforms (S3P) -Industry investment projects has been open for a second assessmen
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
Incremental progress in Nano Pilot in Autumn/Winter 2019
The Nano Pilot demo-cases have been making incremental progress between September – December 2019 and continue to have the support of the network manager and the two leading regions, Emilia-Romagna
Event 11th December: "Brain Drain - Brain Gain: Local and Regional Experience"
The IER - Institute of Economic Research of the Chamber of Commerce of Bolzano/Bozen and the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen are organizing a conference in Brussels on 11 December 2019 on “Bra
ESM Pilot promoted at several conferences
During this second trimester of the year, the ESM Pilot has been extremely active in promoting its activities while participating to several conferences and organising demo-case meetings to boost t
Vanguard Initiative launches a new Task Group on Co-Funding
A new Task Group on Co-Funding has been launched, with the aim to share experiences, debate and influence regional funding policies, instruments and tools that can play an active role in supporting