Finance LIGHTJUMPS
One of the European photonic initiatives is LightJumps, a programme that supports SMEs in accelerating their photonics business. Support actions include technology transfer, financing and market adoption measures, as well as the development of best practices. LightJumps is a combined initiative of six photonics business clusters from France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, plus the national and EU photonics platforms.
l To find out more, visit
www.lightjumps.eu, or take the survey, which aims to identify barriers and needs of European companies operating in the photonics sector:
www.surveymonkey. com/s/LightJumps.
For most participants the value of getting
involved is not so much the funding itself – though there are few division heads who would turn down a little extra fuel in the tank – rather it is the connection it creates with networks of researchers, business partners, suppliers, experts and customers across all of Europe. In H2020 speak this is known as joining the EU innovation ecosystem. Participants can use their involvement to expand their horizons. For some, the value is also in getting closer to the movers and shakers of EU policy, which in turn can reveal opportunities for helping influence and determine that EU policy and how those public euros are spent. If this is one of your aims, then this will be a factor in determining which funding programme to target. So where to start, bearing in mind that once an
organisation gets involved in its first action this will most likely lead to more and at a much lower cost of entry. Getting into the game, or making a major direction change, requires concerted effort. Te list of things to do includes assigning a project manager to study up on it and report back, talking to peers who already do EU projects, joining a relevant association, getting onto the radar of a local enterprise agency and getting a couple of expert consultants to come in and present a participation strategy based on the organisation’s profile. Being a competitive process with greatly varying success rates you need to be prepared to try several times,
@imveurope
www.imveurope.com
to seek out the schemes with highest success rates and develop a smart, high-quality oriented strategy. Tese are not ‘aid’ programmes, but ones that reward a combination of excellence and persistence. Te easiest way to test the waters is to join
someone else’s project team and let them take the lead. To do this the organisation needs to be visible, i.e. on the internet and/or through participation in events and associations, to network, and to connect with the innovation ecosystem on its doorstep. And it’s worth considering paying a professional advisor to connect you into one or more proposals already under development. Te right professional grants and innovation consultants have access to hundreds of proposals-in-progress each year and they can very oſten find the right one for you, as well as making the introductions, getting the participant groomed for it and selling the organisation to its new partners. So what about those acronyms? Tere really are
hundreds of them. For machine vision companies, and anyone else in EU innovation for that matter, the big ticket ones are: H2020: Te EU’s seven-year €72 billion
programme for research and innovation targeting new technologies, energy, transport, health, the bio-economy, resources, security, science, research, finance and entrepreneurship. Tis is the big one. Tere is a wide range of project types from research, to commercialisation, to networking,
6 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • Yearbook 2014/2015
Ilolab/
Shutterstock.com
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