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.
15th of November – Vanguard ESM Workshop
A workshop organised by Vanguard ESM will be held on the 15th of November, in Milano, Italy.
Vanguard’s 3DP pilot: New demo-case for lifelong learning in additive manufacturing receives funding through Horizon 2020 EIT Raw
The project for lifelong learning in additive manufacturing (LILIAM) is a project within the Vanguard Initiative’s demo-case on Tooling, Machinery and Complex Shapes. LILIA
The New Nano-enabled Products Pilot invites you to take part in the next Plenary Meeting - 12-13 November 2018, Bologna (Italy)
The New Nano-enabled Products Pilot within the Vanguard Initiative will hold a Plenary Meeting on 12-13 November 2018 in Bologna, Italy.
More than 60 participants from 14 regions in ESM Pilot meeting
“De and Remanufacturing”, “Smart and Adaptive” and “Digital and Virtual” demo-cases from ESM pilot met on the 29th of June in Milan to present their progresses as well as next steps related to 2018
17th of May - Watify Matchmaking Event on Nanowires
A matchmaking event within the demo-case for Nanowires will be held on the 17th of May, in Lund, Sweden.