Maximising the potential and impact of R&D projects
EU-funded projects and programmes have developed innovative technologies, products and services for the manufacturing industry. Even though the know-how accumulated over the years is immense, the R&D outcomes are not fully exploited. To address this issue, the EU-funded EXPLORE (Extended exploitation of European research projects' knowledge and results) project seeks to make full use of the vast knowledge, competences and resources, and to encourage the industrial exploitation of EU-funded R&D results. During the first year of the project, partners selected 17 participating regions from 9 EU Member States. They gathered and examined socioeconomic, innovation and funding programme data on each. Manufacturing sectors were also chosen, and their key innovation requirements and barriers were identified and analysed. This led to the definition of 18 innovation domains. Preliminary recommendations have been made for future policymaking concerning the designated regions and sectors, and exploitable R&D results. Project members identified and characterised 51 results from EU-funded R&D projects in production technologies. To this end, they have developed an innovation and exploitation platform that disseminates and promotes the commercial exploitation of these results. It mainly targets technology owners, production technology suppliers, manufacturing companies and funding agencies. EXPLORE is helping to achieve a higher exploitation rate for R&D results and wider European exposure and impact of R&D investments. This should result in a more competitive and sustainable European manufacturing sector.
Keywords
R&D, innovation, research and development, manufacturing, production technologies
