MIND4MACHINES aims to facilitate cross-border and cross-sectoral collaboration and to provide direct support for entrepreneurship and innovation in “smart ICT technologies for manufacturing industry”, particularly covering the entire digitalisation value chain, from IoT (hardware, software, services and connectivity) to Big Data, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Cybersecurity technologies Thus, the project aims to create accelerate the market up-take of solutions for deep transformation of energy/resource intensive industries into sustainable, climate neutral and intelligent manufacturing, within the context of the European Green Deal.
MIND4MACHINES targets to support SMEs in the digitalisation value chain via:
- Direct financial support through open calls to facilitate that SMEs – or groups SMEs and other stakeholders – develop, test and fine-tune solutions to bring successful innovations to the market, boosting the generation of new industrial value chains. The innovations tested, supported and scaled up within these open calls will be selected according to criteria based on the MIND4MACHINES Joint Strategic Agenda, a co-created guiding document establishing the main challenges and goals in the selected regions towards the transformation of manufacturing industries into digital, sustainable ones. This will ensure that the funded projects jointly contribute to the large-scale demonstrator objective, validating and scaling up new cross-sectoral and cross-regional value chains.
- Accelerator programmes to increase the capacity of SMEs in digitalisation value chain for scale-up and reach new financial resources by means of investment, funding and new clients. This is why project partners will invest their resources into a series of activities (bootcamps, mentorship, e-learning, etc.) to train technology provider SMEs to detect, engage and obtain successfully the financial sources they need, and to exploit the results of the projects to a wider audience, which could benefit from the technology as potential customers or partners. This work line, complementary to direct financial support, will multiply the chances of success of the companies.
Engaging clusters as key actors to foster cross-sectoral and cross-border new value chains. Clusters are regional innovation ecosystems with a great potential for the replication of new digitalisation solutions funded by MIND4MACHINES, reason why the project partners (already clusters and industry associations) will engage and evangelize other regional clusters to maximise the project’s impacts in Europe through dissemination activities.
