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.
Vanguard New Nano-Enabled Products Pilot: Open Steering Committee The New Nano-Enabled Products Pilot Project held an Open Steering Committee on 1st Jun
The AI Pilot has officially held its kick-off meeting on Monday, 17th May 2021, and presented its vision and its activities for 2021 to more than 100 part
On the 30th of June was held the Mid Term event of the Digital Transformation demo-case, co-coordinated by Sergio Gusmeroli (Politecnico di Milano, Lombardy), Coed de Graaf (Province of Noo
The ADMA Energy partners meeting on 17 May focussed on progressing the proposed actions and activities for 2021, related to the demo case development and networking activities.
Vanguard ESM pilot and Digital Transformation demo-case coordinators are pleased to invite you to the 2021 Mid Term event to be held on June 30 from 9:30 t
On June 3rd, 2021 from 10:00 to12:00 CEST the 3DP PAN EU project will organise a webinar on Additive Manufacturing in the EU: Report on the European
The flyer on the Vanguard Initiative 3D-Printing (3DP) Pilot can be found in attachment.
The ESM Pilot aims at the realisation of an integrated network of European pilot plants and demo-sites supporting the uptake of advantaged technologies boosting manufacturing efficiency and sustain
The flyer on the Vanguard Initiative pilot project in Advanced Manufacturing for Energy Related Applications (
The Vanguard Initiative New Nano-Enabled Products Pilot project has the aim to connect regions in order to build an in
This short document aims at presenting the funding instruments and mechanisms that were used (or considered to be used) in the context of a specific project developed within the Demo Case ‘Automoti
The Bioeconomy Pilot will hold its plenary meeting on Thursday 30 September.