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.
Successful workshop on the availability of regional instruments to fund 3DP Pilot cases
Over the last years and months, the 3DP Pilot was able to design various SMEs-led ‘application-specific projects’ generated by active demo-cases.
First results of the activities towards a funding and financing roadmap for Vanguard Initiative's Pilots
Following the decision to anchor the analysis of the regional funding and financing (F&F) opportunities to the concrete needs of the Vanguard Initiative's Pilots, a process was launched to coll
ProNano: Swedens first testbed for nanotechnology opens in Region Skåne
Within the Nano Pilot, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, in close cooperation with Region Skåne and Lund University, have established and started operations of the ProNano pilot line. On the cam
The 3DP Pilot continues to develop and grow: 5 new project ideas submitted in November 2020
The 3DP Pilot Platform for Pitching and Implementing new cross regional projects was launched in October 2019 in order to further position the 3DP Pilot as an open and flexible cross-regional platf
The ADMA Energy Pilot Outlines its plans for 2021
The year 2020 presented challenges through the global pandemic COVID-19.
The Nano Pilot is growing: three new demo-cases have been launched
The call for ideas launched in September to support the start-up of new demo-cases in the Nano Pilot has originated three proposals.