Funding Europe's aeronautics industry
Europe is looking to maintain if not improve its position in the highly competitive aeronautics industry. To this end, the GROWTH Programme supported the establishment of the European Virtual Institute for Gas Turbine Instrumentation (EVI-GTI). It intends to bring together partners from across the continent to improve collaboration, exploit homegrown expertise, etc. EVI-GTI received project funding for three years, but the goal was for the virtual institute to continue on beyond the project end date. This can only be achieved if additional sources of funding are identified. Hence, European and national funding was examined in detail, culminating in the creation of a comprehensive database. The database, one of the main deliverables of the project, was built with popular tools (e.g. Microsoft Excel) in order to make it user-friendly. It contains information about sources of funding, calls for proposals, a partner database, a project database and so on. It even includes guidance on how to write a successful proposal. The database is to be published to the EVI-GTI website where its members can access it and provide feedback for its improvement. It is a valuable resource that will fuel their R&D strategies. A search mechanism will be implemented to help users find what they are looking for while future effort will be devoted to keeping the database up-to-date.
