During the first period, PhotonQBoost has made substantial progress towards its overall goal of enabling European industries, especially SMEs, to achieve sustainability, resilience, and global competitiveness by adopting Photonics and Quantum technologies. The project focused on establishing the structural, organisational, and collaborative foundations required to support the uptake of Photonics and Quantum technologies by EU SMEs.
Under WP1, a needs analysis assessment allowed the identification of the main needs and solutions and Photonics and quantum solutions were identified for 5 sectors: agrifood, life sciences & health, manufacturing, mobility and digital technologies. Also, different international technology working groups were delivered in the same areas to discuss services and challenges concerning sustainability changes. Moreover, focus groups for sustainability and social innovation were also delivered to further diagnose competence needs. Based on these findings, a catalogue for solutions and use cases were developed to demonstrate photonics and quantum technologies applications for sustainability and resilience.
Under WP2, the service pipeline was settled and the provision of advisory services was put in place. For that, an onboarding from (converging the fuctions as onboarding form and needs analysis survey for WP1) was shared with SMEs from the cluster's networks and also via the project's communication channels to collect interest for the advisory services. A "train the trainers" webinar was delivered to provide guidelines to KAMs on their role. A CRM was created in HubSpot to collect onboarding information of the companies. A Business Advisory Guidebook was also developed, with descriptions on the services being offered.
Under WP3, the design of the calls was smoothly developed and it was possible to launch two open calls still in period 1. The first, delegation visit to Poland, was fully delivered, allowing for cross-fertilization opportunities; the second, call for solutions, delegation visits and trainings and services, was launched in November and will be delivered in the second period.
In the project's first quarter, these steps set the ground for the project’s development, ensuring the achievement of longer-term objectives related to technology adoption, sustainability-oriented applications and SME competitiveness, while already delivering some initial result-driven KPIs.
