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.
Second Plenary Smart Health pilot meeting held on 20 October On the 20 of October 2021, the second Plenary Smart Health pilot meeting was organised.
General Assembly of the Bioeconomy Pilot celebrates the first Natural Fibertastic lustrum at Biobased Delta Biobased Delta hoste
VI participated in the EARTO policy event & innovation award on 27 October 2021 represented by Mr.
The Vanguard Initiative (VI) workshop organised in the framework of the EWRC, provided a valuable opportunity to discuss how European
Th!nk East Netherlands is organising the workshop Regions shaping Europe’s digital future as part of the European Week of Regions and Cities 2021 on 12
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.
Log in to access the New Nano-enabled Products pilot's annual report.
The New Nano Enabled Products Pilot action plan builds on the work carried out in 2020 and aims at presenting the expected objectives for 2021 in relation to the proposed project development.
This Annual plan is the main reference that will guide the Bioeconomy Pilot activities during 2020.
To participate in the Vanguard Pilot Monitoring Task Group meeting, please contact Task Group leader Wim De Kinderen [email protected].
The Artificial Intelligence Pilot action of the Vanguard Initiative is pleased to invite you to its 2021 Plenary Digital Event!
The coordinators of Vanguard ESM Pilot are pleased to invite you to the ESM 2021 final plenary event to discuss th
The biennial European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation discusses issues related to the economics and policy of corporate R&D and innovation.
On Innovations and Challenges in the field of Health and Quality of Life Life Science Open Space - The Open Innovation Forum is dedicated to peo