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.
Progress update from the bioeconomy pilot
Talking on rural innovation and regions’ green transformation with the Bioeconomy Pilot
A new paper of the Bioeconomy Pilot has published by the Open Access journal “Sustainability.”
In recent decades, industrial research has devoted enormous investments to demonstrate sustainable circular bio-based business models capable of overcoming the “Valley of
Smart Health: new Vanguard Initiative pilot project launched
On 14th of April the kick-off event of the Smart Health Vanguard Initiative pilot project t
The new Vanguard AI Pilot Kick-Off meeting
Vanguard Initiative’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Pilot is one of the two new Pilots launched by Vanguard in 2021.
Vanguard Initiative Regional Conference: New growth of industrial regions through Smart Specialization
The Vanguard Initiative Regional Conference New growth of industrial regions through Smart Specialization
EU Industry Days: successful webinar on The Industrial Transition
The EU Industry Days webinar Regions in Industrial Transition: Making digital work for SMEs in regional innovation ecosystems organized by Th!nk East Netherlands in the framework o