Project description
Bridging the innovation gap in central Europe
Economic growth and competitiveness depend on innovation, yet disparities across Europe hinder equitable progress. Open calls for EU-funded research often widen the gap between Northern/Western and Southern/Eastern Europe, limiting the economic impact on regions that need it most. While Czechia and Slovakia have increased their R&D spending, innovation levels remain low, with patent applications falling far below the EU benchmark. This underscores the need for targeted support to translate research into economic value. With this in mind, the EU-funded GlaCerHub project will establish an innovation ecosystem for the advanced glass and ceramics sector in South Moravia and Trenčín regions. By fostering collaboration between industry, academia, and policymakers, it will drive R&D investment and boost IP protection.
Objective
Productivity, competitiveness, and economic growth stem from innovation and are vital in collaborative research projects. However, given the heterogeneity of economic and industrial frameworks between North/Western Europe and South/Eastern Europe, open calls for European funded research projects often exacerbate the knowledge gap between more and less developed regions. This in turn, limits the economic impact of this funding on areas that often need it the most.
Czechia and Slovakia have been growing their gross domestic expenditure on R&D, almost doubling it since 2005. However, this growth does not directly equal innovation, with patent applications per million of the population not reaching 15% of the EU benchmark.
The GlaCerHub project will strive to support the virtuous innovation and economic cycle by capitalizing on the present-day competitive advantage of the advanced glass and ceramics industry to create a place-based innovation ecosystem in the border region between South Moravia (Czechia), and Trenčín (Slovakia), a region with long tradition in these areas.
The GlaCerHub consortium will create a dynamic, specialist innovation ecosystem for the advanced glass and ceramics sector by stimulating new synergies between industry, academia, government, society and other European innovation Ecosystems. In the long term GlaCerHub will become a self-sustaining entity, supporting the creation, development, piloting and protection of strategic technologies, training of all stakeholders from the quadruple helix, and creating and supporting technology transfer.
The long term impact will be to increase:
- investment in glass and ceramics R&D
- IP protection and patent applications
- spin-off creation
- intersectoral PhDs (and international PhDs)
- licensing transactions
- national, regional and European recognition of GlaCerHub as a centre of excellence
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringceramics
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ACCESS-04
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
91150 Trencin
Slovakia