Successful completion of the pioneering PLATON project

The 27-month journey of PLATON project has been successfully completed. Within its duration the project partners have supported European SMEs to participate in socio-economic research projects under the European Framework Programmes (FP6 & FP7). New experiences have been acquired as PLATON was the 1st project ever targeting enhanced SME participation in European socio-economic research.

Being a pioneer, PLATON has been exceptionally successful. The project has developed and operated an infrastructure that is available after the end of the project, while during its implementation has provided valuable support to a large number of organisations – interested parties. The partners of PLATON met and exceeded by far the project’s main targets, by expanding their collaboration with other project stakeholders such as the European Commission, the network of the National Contact Points for socio-economic research, key researchers in the area as well as other similar / complementary projects and networks.

Overall 22 events were organized under the project activities (info-days / workshops, round-tables, networking events, training sessions, dissemination workshop) with more than 1.300 participants all over Europe. Around 270 SMEs and SME groupings have been supported by PLATON partners through the provision of tailored services.

The project web-database has now more than 670 registered users / organisations and the on-line web-tool for partner searches has been used by hundreds of organisations so that they can identify potential partners and / or submit their own collaboration profile and research ideas. As a concrete result overall more than 93 organisations joined research consortia with the help of PLATON with 30 of them being SMEs or SME groupings. A much larger number of organisations have circulated their research ideas and partner searches through the project consortium.

Post-project continuation has been agreed: the project website, with the database and web-tools will continue to operate for at least 2 years, while the project partners will continue to collaborate to circulate partner searches. Interested parties can get valuable reports on socio-economic trends, needs assessment of SMEs, identified good practices, an analysis of interesting research sub-areas for the business community through the project website.
PLATON most successful activities are being updated and upgraded under a new project (PLATONplus, funded under EU 7th Framework Programme), while new activities will be implemented.

For more information visit: www.platonproject.net

or contact:
Mr. Iakovos DELIOGLANIS – [e-mail], [phone]
Mr. Dimitris PAPAGEORGIOU – [e-mail] , [phone]

Q-PLAN North Greece (coordinator of PLATON project)
http://www.qplanng.gr
Thessaloniki (GR)

Countries

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom