"Public funded research needs to fully benefit society. This is especially true for environmental and climate research where successful market uptake is particularly urgent. However, the market uptake for public environmental R&D results remains a challenge. The main barriers have been identified by the partners for DG Research (2006) as fragmentation of information, inward communication of researchers, lack of market knowledge and innovation management skills and public funding gaps.
ECO-PRO seeks to remove some of these barriers and to accelerate market take-up by maximising the potential use value of R&D results through an e-dissemination process addressing their usefulness, usability and applicability for an eco innovation community.
To achieve this general objective, ECO-PRO will develop three lines of complementary e-dissemniation activities:
Gathering, selecting, classifying and packaging in an useable manner the most useful and exploitable results (at least 100) from FP6 and FP7 in a virtual library;
Designing and operating an interactive platform including useful, usable and acceptable knowledge modules and tools supporting the market take-up of R&D results: EU funding guide and helpdesk, webinars, VNRs, e-technology brokering tool, etc.
(Net-) working throughout the project with eco-innovation actors as well as kick-starting and maintaining a dedicated open community involving more than 2,000 eco-innovation stakeholders in an interactive ECO-PRO platform.
The ECO-PRO platform will be useful for potential technology users (good and clear information) as well as for R&D teams (the best way to present the results to the market).
Greenovate and youris are 2 European non-for-profit networks with focus on eco-innovation. Their core business is knowledge exploitation, dissemination and audiovisual science communication. Their competences, networks and experience will ensure that ECO-PRO succeeds beyond the end of EC funding."