Project description
Making space for green innovation
Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Europe are missing out on opportunities from the European Space Programme (EUSpace). Despite its potential to support green and digital transitions, these businesses often lack the technological capacity to take full advantage of it. As a result, the EU’s sustainability goals remain unfulfilled. In this context, the EU-funded FIERCE project aims to change this by engaging 140 SMEs, start-ups, and scale-ups. It provides specialised technical and business support to help these companies develop solutions using space data. FIERCE offers access to market services and infrastructure, driving innovation in areas like circularity and environmental monitoring. By connecting SMEs with local and EU-wide networks, FIERCE accelerates their journey to market.
Objective
The European Space Programme (EUSpace) holds vast potential to fulfil the EU green and digital (twin) transition, but SMEs limited uptake and technological capacity is preventing them from fully unlocking the green and digital transformation. FIERCE aims to address these limitations by mobilising 140 SMEs, start-ups and scale-ups with specialised technical and business advisory to design business solutions and engage in process innovation using downstream space data in areas such as circularity, raw materials, environmental monitoring and corporate sustainability (space-enabled green solutions). We mobilise 2.5 million EUR in financial support providing 70 SMEs with access to market services and key infrastructure to realise their vision through Transformation Projects, supporting ideation, scaling up and commercialization of space-enabled solutions, accelerating SMEs journey to the market. We complement our support for SMEs with 10+ Local Entrepreneurship Initiatives driven by innovation intermediaries and business support networks (DIHs, clusters etc.) aimed creating more SME opportunities for space-enabled green innovation through synergies with regional industrial, research and market actors and infrastructure providers (OITBs). We reach further to key EU-wide networks (EEN, SME Alliance, EARSC) through our Strategic Partnership Network to create synergies and joint activities to navigate SMEs and innovation intermediaries towards exploiting high-impact opportunities for funding, collaboration and knowledge exchange, as well as jointly organized FIERCE investment tracks in the frame of key industry and business events. We deploy the FIERCE digital toolbox to enrich our support with 50+ learning resources, 10+ practical tools and 70+ qualified service providers to create a vibrant dedicated community. Finally, we monitor our performance and impact to design practical replication handbooks to inspire wider application and recommendations for enabling policies.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managemententrepreneurship
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.2.4 - Digital, Industry and Space Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
551 33 Kalamaria, Thessaloniki
Greece
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.