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.
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.
During the 2021 ESM Plenary event, Slovenia presented the "Circular Economy in Textile Secto
On November 9th, ART-ER (the business development agency of Emilia Romagna) in collaboration wit
Where to look when organisations cannot find the expertise they need to complete a 3D printing project within their existing network?
On the 9th of December the final event of the Efficient and Sustainable Manufacturing Pilot take place, co-coordinated by Giacomo Copani (AFIL, Lombardy), Patrick
Partnering Opportunity: the MEMS for nano-analytiX demo case published a technology offer on the EEN portal The Bologna Unit of CNR-
The adversity of the Covid-19 situation has shown the very real value of collaboration, both within and between regions.
This annual plan sets out the programme of work that Vanguard Initiative will seek to accomplish during 2021 and is informed by discussions in the Annual Politica
In 2021, ESM activities will be managed in continuity with the previous years, focusing specifically on the development of demo-case projects and on the consolidation of use-cases enlarging the ind
The 2021 Annual Plan is the primary reference that guides the Bioeconomy Pilot activities, by providing primary direction supporting the strengthening partnerships and defining a feasible financial
This Annual plan is the main reference that will guide the ESM Pilot activities during 2020.
The ADMA Energy Pilot action plan builds on the work carried out in 2019 and aims at presenting the expected objectives for 2020 in relation to the proposed project development.
Circular Economy in Textile and Plastic Sector
Facility centres (in the context of this project) are public or private organisations providing quality services related to testing, validating and certifying 3D Printing solutions.
While providing a brief update on the current exciting developments of the AI pilot, the conference aims at showcasing existing regional best practices and ongoing region
The next VI 3DP Pilot Plenary Meeting will be held on the 15th of December 2021!