A new European Union funded innovation action, NEPTUNE* (New Cross Sectoral Value Chains Creation across Europe Facilitated By Clusters for SMEs’ Innovation in Blue Growth) was successfully launched in July 2016. The NEPTUNE Blue Growth accelerator brings together the expertise of 8 clusters, 2 cluster and entrepreneurship support organisations, 1 engineer school and 1 consultant company from 7 European countries: France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden. The accelerator will run for 30 months until December 2018 under the coordination of Aerospace Valley.
The overall objective is to develop new cross-sectoral and cross-border industrial value-chains led by SMEs to foster the development of three key aspects for the Blue Growth industries in Europe and beyond:
(1) the water management in urban and rural environment,
(2) the fluvial and maritime transport and port logistics;
(3) and the environment and renewable marine energy.
This development will be allowed by the integration of new technologies and know-how between Water, Aerospace, ICT and Agriculture cluster actors/industries.
To reach this objective, the NEPTUNE accelerator will help the emergence of cross-sectoral and cross-border solutions led by SMEs, and will directly support SMEs cross-sectoral product or service for Blue Growth with a complete coaching, mentoring and voucher system.
An important moment of the project will be the launch of the NEPTUNE Calls for Expression of Interests in November 2016, with 2 cut-offs deadlines in February 2017 and August 2017. To prepare these, Interclustering Innovation Clubs will be managed to foster the emergence of SMEs led projects.
This survey has to be filled in by local stakeholders (regional authorities, potential SME applicants to the NEPTUNE calls, large companies, clusters, etc.) to provide NEPTUNE with feedback on local trends/needs/challenges. This feedback would be used to define both the topics of the NEPTUNE calls and the topics of the innovation clubs.
By answering this survey you authorises the NEPTUNE consortium to collect and process the personal data you provide for the only purpose of preparing the NEPTUNE calls and topics to be addressed by the innovation clubs.
* The NEPTUNE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 691554
