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.
Member Conference Announcement - Boosting Innovation for EU Industry: Industrial Infrastructures and Open Innovation Ecosystems
The Slovenian Business and Research Association cordially invites you to the conference "Boosting Innovation for EU Industry: Industrial Infrastructures and Open Innovation Ecosystems" on Wednesday
ESM Pilot: a year of consolidation and improvement of demo-cases
On 18 December 2018, the Vanguard ESM Pilot held a plenary meeting in Brussels, hosted by the Lombardy Region.
14 December: 3DP Pilot Plenary Meeting
On the 14th of December the Pilot Project on High Performance Production through 3D-Printing will organise a Plenary meeting, The event will aim at reinforcing progress made (e.g.
18 December: ESM Plenary Meeting
The Vanguard Efficient and Sustainable Manufacturing (ESM) Pilot Project is pleased to invite you to the 2018 Plenary Event that will be organised in Brussels.
Successful project application for building a pan-EU database for 3D-printing services
The project application of the 3D-printing Pilot Project to create a pan-European digital platform connecting all 3D-printing (3dP) demonstration facilities in the EU was approved last week by DG G
SME access to infrastructures
Conference “EU Research and Innovation Infrastructures: a forward agenda for cross-regional collaboration and access”