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.
International Cluster-to-Cluster Meeting, Bologna, 5th June 2019
The International Cluster-to-Cluster Meeting - C2C - is conceived as a summit gathering national and regional clusters from European countries aiming to exchange innovative models for cluster coope
Strong emphasis on industrial needs and challenges in the 3DP Pilot Project
Over the last weeks, the 3D-Printing Pilot project has put a particular emphasis on three key action lines, which resulted in some promising progress.
Successful first steering committee of the Efficient and Sustainable Manufacturing Pilot Project
After the approval of the 2019 Action Plan during the Network Representatives’ Meeting, which took place in Brussels on February 20th, the Pilot activities started immediately to boost prog
Bioeconomy Pilot Project to participate in several European events organised by the bio-based sector
The Bioeconomy Pilot is having a busy spring and will participate in several events organised by the bio-based sector, both as speakers and moderators of technical sessions.
Key steps forward in creating new demonstration opportunities in marine renewables and offshore energy applications
2019 has seen a busy few months for ADMA Energy partners, with a flurry of activity around the final months of the NeSSIE project, new opportunities to take forwards our demonstration cases
Three potential new demo cases in the New Nano Enabled Products Pilot Project
In April 2018, the Emilia-Romagna region joined Skåne as co-leading region for the Nano Pilot.