Enterprise Europe Brussels: ready to go for Horizon 2020!
Last October, the last annual conference of the 2007-2014 Enterprise Europe Network took place in Turin. The opportunity to take stock of 7 years spent supporting and guiding European companies towards European market opportunities and beyond. Seven years of challenges the network had to tackle against the tasks and mission assigned by the European Commission: helping companies make the most of the European market. The conference marked the end of the mandate of the current network and announced the era of the new one, which will start operating as of January 1st, 2015.
Among the other elements emphasised during the Conference, it is worthwhile mentioning the signature – thanks to the current network – of 11.000 transnational collaboration agreements in commercial, technology transfer and R&DI projects or opportunities.
Who?
impulse.brussels (ex-ABE - Brussels Enterprise Agency) contributed to these results by helping Brussels-based companies to reach - between 2008 and 2014 - 68 cooperation agreements with foreign firms or research centres. These results are largely above the goals set by the Commission for impulse. They are built on the professionalism of its Enterprise Europe Brussels advisors who establish a long-term and trustful professional relationship with the Brussels entrepreneurs.
This allows Enterprise Europe Brussels advisors to learn and understand the development strategy and international growth purposes of the companies. In such a way, they are able to detect – in a customised and proactive approach - the collaboration opportunities which most likely will meet companies’ business objectives.
A few results
The signature of 68 transnational collaboration agreements is the tangible result of an intensive and wider upstream activity consisting of, eg:
- providing visibility to 280 Brussels-based offer or request collaboration profiles, published in the networks database and distributed in 54 countries via the EEN database
- supporting 337 companies to participate in more than 100 matchmaking (B2B) events,
- assisting 1596 pre-arranged meetings
- following-up (together with the companies) the most promising meetings till the signature of the agreements
The matchmaking events, the collaboration profiles and the meetings are means to identify qualified potential partners with whom the Brussels companies will deal a business collaboration. This latter may result in:
- commercial agreement with technical assistance
- license agreements
- technology transfer through integration of a product or a technical solution into another to provide a more complete product/service,
- access to a R&DI European consortium (H2020)
Along with this, hundreds of accompaniments and answers to issues related to access to R&DI funding under FP7 and H2020, intellectual property rights and information seminars on various European issues.
A professional support recognised by the network and the European Commission during the EEN conference via an award: the "EEN Super Hero" for the contribution given to the network and the network spirit which was attributed to impulse.brussels (Barbara Andreani). The aim is that Brussels companies may benefit from this through EEB services!
For the future, impulse.brussels will focus even more on its expertise to support innovation, R&DI and the technology transfer across all sectors, with the current EEB services and a new ones: the assessment of SMEs’ capacity to manage their innovation & the support to "SME Instrument" beneficiaries.
Willing to learn more?
Contact or Barbara Andreani