SMART4ALL First Open Call Cross-Domain Technology Transfer Experiments (CTTE)

Deadline: Mar 1, 2021  
CALL EXPIRED

1 Introduction

SMART4ALL is a H2020 funded project (Grant Agreement No. 872614) that builds capacity amongst European stakeholders via the development of self-sustained, cross-border experiments that transfer knowledge and technology between academia and industry. It targets Customised Low-Energy Computing (CLEC) for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) and combines a set of unique characteristics that join together under a common vision different cultures, different policies, different geographical areas and different application domains.

The SMART4ALL consortium is led by the University of Peloponnese (Greece) and is composed of 25 partners from Central, South and Eastern Europe.

SMART4ALL brings a new paradigm for revealing “hidden innovation treasures” – mainly from geographical areas that are underrepresented in European funding – and helping them to find the path to market via new, innovative commercial products. As part of its strategy, the project will develop and maintain an active network of DIHs across Central, South and Eastern Europe for supporting academics, SMEs and Slightly Bigger Companies entering the digitisation era.

In order to achieve this, SMART4ALL will design and implement 3 types of cross-border Pathfinder Application Experiments (PAEs):

1) Knowledge Transfer Experiments (KTE), which comprise a novel type of internship experiments allowing smaller projects, or less mature ideas to be presented, tested and thus potentially find the fertile ground to grow and reveal its product potentials;

2) Focused Technology Transfer Experiments (FTTEs), focusing on one of the four defined underrepresented areas, will give the opportunity to form synergies, accelerate product orient projects and offer guidance towards successful commercialisation;

3) Cross-domain Technology Transfer Experiments (CTTEs), targeting more complex multidisciplinary transfers and productization of novel CLEC CPS and the IoT technologies to wider markets.

The targeted application areas are domains that are not adequately represented in current Smart Anything Everywhere (SAE) projects and include digitized environment, digitized agriculture, digitized anything and digitized transport.

SMART4ALL introduces also the concept of Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS) that acts as one-stop-smart- stop of SMART4ALL DIH cluster for offering tools, services, platforms based mainly on open sources technologies as well as technology suppliers-adopter matchmaking capabilities customised to the four thematic pillars of the project.

SMART4ALL also plans horizontal activities that will support the Digital Skills Agenda of the European Commission and the support of sensitive social groups via ideas and products that have significant impact on their lives. This is especially relevant since the apparition and spread of the COVID-19 crisis; SMART4ALL’s Open Calls will aim to address solutions facilitating its management before, during and after the crisis.

This Guide for Applicants describes the SMART4ALL first Open Call for Cross-Domain Technology Transfer Experiments (CTTEs).

2 CTTE 1st Open Call Summary

2.1 Basedefinitions

• -  Academic Organisations refers to Universities and other Academic Institutions.

• -  Industrial Organisations refers to SME and Slightly Bigger Companies as defined in Section 3.1.

• -  System Integrators/Technology Providers refers to Academic or Industrial Organisations as defined in Section 3.1.

• -  Pathfinder Application Experiments (PAE): Experiments for supporting the enhancement of the digital skills of European citizens. Knowledge Transfer Experiments (KTEs), which act as internships/traineeships, apprenticeships and short-term training programmes for unemployed people for vacant digital jobs. Focused Technology Transfer Experiments (FTTEs) and Cross-domain Technology Transfer Experiments (CTTEs), which are cross-border technology transfer experiments that bring together European companies, social partners, non-profit organizations and education, and intend to bring digital skills to labour force.

• -  Executive Board is the SMART4ALL governance body in charge of the scientific planning and monitoring of the execution of the Project. It is comprised of the SMART4ALL Work Package leaders and the Project coordinators.

• -  Selection Committee is the SMART4ALL governance body that will decide the selected beneficiaries of the Open Call. It is composed of the Executive Board and 2 External Evaluators (an additional External Evaluator will be added in case if a tie).

• -  Mentoring Committee is the SMART4ALL governance body that will evaluate the selected projects performance across the grant-cycle. It is comprised of the Technical Project Officers, the Innovation Officer, the Business Development Officer, as well as the Technical and Business Mentors.

2.2 CTTEataglance

The Cross-Domain Technology Transfer Experiments (CTTE) funding instrument, focusing on one of the four defined verticals (Digitized Transport, Digitized Agriculture, Digitized Environment and Digitized Anything), will give the opportunity to form synergies, accelerate product orient projects and offer guidance towards successful commercialisation.

It will be of short-term duration (6-9 months) and will consist of cross-border Pathfinder Application Experiments (PAEs) between 3 different entities from at least two different eligible countries (as per the eligibility criteria stated in section 3.2).

For this CTTE Open Call, One Academic/Industrial Technology Provider transfers a novel technology to one Industrial Technology Receiving partner as an early-adopter and then one Industrial productization partner extends the value chain. The partners shall apply together as a consortium through a simple application form.

The consortium composition can be as follows:

The leading partner must always have an Industrial partner status (SME or Slightly Bigger company).

Within these types of experiments, one party transfers to the receiving partner a specific Hardware (HW) or Software (SW) novel technology as an early-adopter and one productization partner extends the value chain.

Once PAEs will be selected, SMART4ALL will offer to the partners and third parties (Open Call beneficiaries):

• Technological support, including technical coaching and IPR and open access support through a specialized technological mentor for each experiment.

• Business support and funding access, including support for development of a business plan and identification of public and private funding sources through a specialized business mentor for each experiment.

• Visibility, thanks to the cooperation portal where all PAEs and beneficiaries will be published and the participation of SMART4ALL in main events at EU level.

SMART4ALL will organize 3 CTTE open calls, one per year during the first 36 months of the project. All SMART4ALL Open Calls are single-stage. There will be 12 beneficiaries over the course of the project.

Beneficiaries will be provided up to EUR 80,000 as a lump sum. In this first CTTE open call, a total financial support of EUR 320,000 (estimated) will be provided for approx. 4 CTTEs as a whole.

2.3 What is the technology behind SMART4ALL?

SMART4ALL focuses on CLEC, i.e. low-energy computing technologies applied in four SMART4ALL verticals with European leadership and strategic importance, including but not limited to the following SMART4ALL competence fields (see table below):

DIGITIZED TRANSPORT

• ●  Green transport

• ●  Smart mobility

• ●  Shared mobility

• ●  Robotics

• ●  New platforms for efficient supply- demand matchmaking

• ●  Automotive electronics

• ●  Autonomous vehicles

• ●  Connected vehicles

• ●  Streamlining transport using big data

• ●  Aeronautics and space applications

• ●  Transport and Logistics

• ●  City Transport Mapping

DIGITIZED ENVIRONMENT 

• ●  Smartbuilding

  • Smarthome

  • Critical infrastructure monitoring

  • Smart hospitals

• ●  Water pollution monitoring

• ●  Smartgrids

  • Energy management

• ●  Environment monitoring

  • Rural areas ->

    Monitoring attractions such as lakes and rivers (both water and wet area).

  • Urban areas -> indoor and outdoor pollution and noise monitoring.

• ●  Bio-diversity • Wild/migratory animals monitoring

• ●  Smart industry

• ● Data processing & data visualization:

• Processed data are visualized for monitoring by the interested parties (data can be accessed live in the web page of municipality)

• The data will be used to build models for future prediction.

• ● Data processing & data visualization:

  • Processed data are

    visualized for monitoring by the interested parties (data can be accessed live in the web page of municipality)

  • The data will be used to build models for future prediction.

DIGITIZED AGRICULTURE

• ●  Smart farming

• ●  AI inspired agriculture

• ●  Information based site specific applications

• ●  Demand driven, sustainable agriculture

• ●  Mobile plant, soil and environment sensors

• ●  Sensor networks – EU wide – cross-border

• ●  Field robotics and automation systems

• ●  UAV based agriculture and plant monitoring

• ●  Selective plant protection

• ●  Closed nutrient cycles

• ●  Agricultural decision support systems

• ●  Zero-energy food systems

• ●  Circular economy

• ●  Water, Energy and Food (WEF) efficiency

• ●  Revalorization of agricultural waste

DIGITIZED ANYTHING 

• ●  Human-machine Interaction

• ●  Digital Education

• ●  Industrial Automation

• ●  Machine Learning

• ●  Market Intelligence

• ●  Medical and Health Applications

• ●  Active & Healthy Ageing

• ●  Support for disabled persons

• ●  Cybersecurity

• ●  Data Mining and Big Data

• ●  Personal security

• ●  Additive Manufacturing (3D printing)

• ●  Augmented and Virtual Reality

• ●  Audio/Video Processing

• ●  Location-based Technologies

• ● Web and Mobile Applications

• ●  Wireless Sensor Networks

• ●  Disaster management

• ●  Digital heritage

• ●  Telemedicine

• ●  Rehabilitation, wellness, fitness

• ●  E-commerce

SMART4ALL will pay special attention to CLEC applications facilitating COVID-19 management crisis and all aspects of life before, during and after such crisis, focusing on the above four verticals.

2.4 TypeofActivity

Types of activities that qualify for financial support are cross border technology transfers in the following format:

One partner (industrial or academic) from one eligible country transfers a particular novel hardware or software technology in the domain of Customized Low-Energy Computing (CLEC) for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to a receiving industry partner (SME or Slightly Bigger Company) from a different eligible country. One industrial productization partner extends the value chain. The transfer may include exclusive or non-exclusive licensing, training, services, documentation, etc., as necessary. The product or solution has to deal with one of the competence fields from one of the four SMART4ALL verticals abovementioned in section 2.3.

The receiving partner adopts and deploys this technology to enable improved products, processes or services (e.g. by gains concerning product cost, performance, or power consumption). Thereby, the technology receiver will achieve innovation and measurable impact, (e.g. in terms of increased revenue or newly created jobs).

EXAMPLES: CTTE Examples:

1) The compression algorithm with adequate adaption/enhancement is used in wireless communication for medical purposes.

2) A hardware accelerator is integrated and used in surveillance or medical or ambient assisted living environments purposes.

2.5 What is the application procedure?

Proposals must be submitted online using the application form available on the FundingBox submission platform at https://smart4all.fundingbox.com/. Proposals submitted by any other means will not be considered eligible for financial support.

For any proposal submitted, the applicant acts as the main contact between the consortium and SMART4ALL. It is the applicant’s responsibility to ensure the timely submission of the proposals. Applicants are encouraged to submit their proposals a few days prior to the submission deadline to avoid any potential problems during the submission process.

A submitted proposal can be edited and updated as often as needed until the closing deadline of the open call. The last saved version of the submitted proposal at the time of the call closing deadline will be considered for evaluation only. Any further modification of the proposal will not be possible.

The submission platform will allow the applicant to download the complete proposal for reference.

2.6 Whathappensaftertheapplicationissubmitted?

Shortly after proposal submission, an automatically generated acknowledgement of receipt will be sent to the applicant’s email address. The selection process will start, comprising the following stages:

• ●  Eligibility check: check if the proposal meets the eligibility criteria included in section 3. ●

• ●  Final selection: Up to 4 consortia will be finally selected for funding. Prior to a formal communication to the successful consortia, the list of winners will be sent for review and acceptance to the Project Officer of the European Commission.

  The whole process is described in detail in section 4.

  2.7 Financialsupport

  The CTTE partners will apply for financial support by submitting one joint proposal describing the CTTE and its technical plan and a detailed estimation of the CTTE-related costs.

• Financial support per CTTE
  The CTTE experiments will be supported with a lump sum of up to EUR 80,000.

• Financial support per CTTE partner

Every CTTE partner can receive a maximum financial support of EUR 60,000.

Financial support will be paid out to the leading partner, who will then distribute the funds to the other partners according to the resource distribution set up in the proposal.

The financial support will be paid based on the submission and approval of deliverables as defined in section 2.9.

2.8 Eligiblecosts

The total financial support per CTTE includes the reimbursement of the following cost forms only:

• Costs of the staff involved in the CTTE;

• CTTE-related training and service activities for the industry partners;

• License and IPR agreement development;

• Necessary travel costs for mutual CTTE partner visits or CTTE presentations or demonstrations organized by SMART4ALL;

• Costs for providing open access to CTTE related scientific publications;

• Consumables and Equipment costs.

Experts evaluation: each proposal will be evaluated by 2 (two) independent and confidential external

evaluators with wide expertise in CLEC, CPS and/or IoT.

Consensus Meeting: the SMART4ALL Selection Committee will meet and decide by consensus and based on the ranking obtained as result of the external expert evaluation.

2.9 DeliverablesandPaymentarrangements

The cross-border CTTE selected will define at the beginning of the support programme, together with the mentors allocated, an ‘Individual Mentoring Plan (IMP)’. This document establishes the KPIs and the 3 Deliverables that will be considered when evaluating the SMART4ALL Experiments’ performance at the milestones.

The ‘Mentoring Committee’ will evaluate the selected projects performance at the review milestones (established every 2-3 months), according with the following criteria:

• Deliverables quality. To be scored by the Mentors based on the Deliverables established in the IMP.

• Business performance indicators. To be scored by the Business Mentors based on the KPIs

  established in the IMP

• Technical performance indicators. To be scored by the Technical Mentor based on the KPIs

  established in the IMP.

• Deadline Compliance. To be scored by the Mentors.

  Each criterion will be scored from 0 to 10 and the weight of each one of these criteria, in the final score, will be as follows:

• Deliverable quality (30%).

• Technical performance indicators (30%).

• Business performance indicators (30%).

• Deadline Compliance (10%).

  According with this final score:

• Beneficiaries over threshold (7 points) will successfully receive the next payment and be candidate to continue in the programme.

• Beneficiaries under threshold. Those beneficiaries which have not reached the threshold will be reviewed by the ‘Selection Committee’ who will take the final decision considering all possible objective reasons for underperformance(i.e. external factors which might have influenced the beneficiaries’ performance). Those not passing this examination will not receive the next payment and will be invited to leave the programme.

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