INL leads a 1.5 million euros European funded project to support companies through Open Innovation
July 13, 2020
A new project led by INL – International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory won a European competition under the Horizon 2020 INNOSUP program, aiming to test new approaches to better support innovation through funding innovation agents.
Open Innovation has been considered, since 2015, a priority by the European Commission, which sees this collaborative model as a way for companies to reduce financial risks and achieve a competitive advantage more quickly.
Among the dozens of candidates for the competition, the consortium led by INL was chosen to develop a project that will support companies from all over the European continent, through the practical application of Open Innovation, through which companies seek ideas externally and technologies that can be integrated into any internal innovation processes.
By 2023, the PITCCH network, the name chosen for the project, will be able to build a European ecosystem to support the development of industrial innovation capacity.
Thus, the project will bring together two distinct business realities – Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Multinationals – to accelerate the co-creation of cutting-edge innovations, based on advanced technologies.
The PITCCH network will have as its main support an online platform for Multinationals to launch technological challenges and where a structured collaboration between them and SMEs will be developed, with Technological Centers in between.
These collaborations aim to strengthen the industrial capacities and the competitiveness of European companies with a focus on the Digitization of Industry axes; Digital Transformation; Health, Demographic Change, and Well-being; Food Security, Sustainable Agriculture, and Bioeconomy; Efficient, Safe and Clean Energy; Intelligent, Green and Integrated Transport; and also Climate Action, Efficiency in the use of resources and raw materials.
The launch of the enterprise collaboration platform is scheduled for early 2021.
The consortium for this project is composed of the following partners: INL (International); TNO (Netherlands); RINA (Italy); S2i (Germany); Vitamina (Portugal).
