This summary describes the achievements of the POlish Support to Innovation and Technology IncubatiON (POSITION) project. This project lasted between 1st of January 2015 and 31st of December 2016.
POSITION focused on the support of the development of Polish GNSS applications. The project attempted to follow the predicted trend of GNSS sector development in Europe, especially in the field of commercial applications. It is important from the Polish perspective, where so far very little GNSS applications have been created, but at the same time this country is considered to be the largest unexplored European hi-tech market. Project POSITION aimed at changing this situation. The EU contribution to POSITION was 312 k EUR. In total the "turnover" from subsequent accepted actions, grants and investments is estimated to be 4.3 M EUR.
The achievements of the project POSITION are the following:
- A new framework,
- Over 1 M EUR of investments in supported startups and SMEs,
- One of participating teams has secured a significant ca. 2 M EUR R&D grant for further development,
- One of the first “Demo Day” for space sector in Europe,
- Over 10 teams that have been supported extensively by POSITION team, six of them selected to present at the “Demo Day”,
- A new, possibly the first European downstream space sector accelerator “Space3ac”, which for the first time was organised in summer 2016,
- 1.3 M EUR received from the Polish Agency of Enterprise Development (PARP) for second edition of Space3ac (topic: “Space3ac: Satellite techniques for intermodal transportation”),
- Support to the new academic course related to space technologies and their use,
- Relations established with the governmental stakeholders (e.g. PARP or Agency of Industry Development, ARP), despite change of government,
- Greater degree of interaction with the GNSS community.
POSITION is a “Coordination and Support Action” - type project, which is to be realised by two partners: the Polish investment fund Black Pearls Investments (part of Black Pearls VC) and SpaceTec Partners, a strategy, management and communications consultancy group within the European space sector Their joint goal was to support at least ten promising projects utilising GNSS and prepare them for market entry. The project on its own has focused only on Poland due to the fact that this is the largest country from all newer EU members. Any subsequent projects will be done in international conditions.
