CPSE Labs created six CPS Design Centres in five European countries, each providing specific CPS engineering competencies and supported technologies and platforms for relevant CPS applications domains. A Strategic Innovation Agenda was developed to describe the objectives of the Centres to foster innovation in their specific fields. The Design Centres grew ecosystems of stakeholders around their technology focus, and also established new and reinforced existing links to achieve sustained long-term collaboration between the Design Centres. To progress towards sustainability, several Design Centres became part of larger regional investments towards building Digital Innovation Hubs.
CPSE Labs defined and implemented a coherent process to create and run innovation experiments with third parties. Experiments were initiated through competitive Open Calls, where European businesses could submit proposals for innovative experiments for the topics offered by the Design Centres. The topics for these three calls were aligned with and derived from the Strategic Innovation Agenda of CPSE Labs. Three rounds of Open calls were conducted; independent experts evaluated the 102 proposals received from 178 organisations, of which 119 were industrial (102 SMEs), covering 21 European countries. Altogether, 22 experiments were executed and completed by a total of 39 third parties from 15 countries, including 19 SMEs. The CPSE Labs Design Centres provided extensive support to the experiments, offering targeted trainings on the selected Design Centre technologies and collaborative development work. Third parties involved in experiments developed prototypes and demonstrators for innovative CPS solutions, increased their knowledge on deployment of digital technologies for their business, stimulated innovation capacity, identified business opportunities, and created further collaborations with Design Centres, among experiment partners, and with customers. Experiment outcomes provide prime examples for successful technology transfer from research to industry.
To establish regional learning networks at the Design Centres, CPSE Labs carried out investigations to create a solid understanding of the innovation and engineering eco-systems surrounding the Design Centres, and identified industrial needs for professional training that would match the offerings of CPSE Labs. Various learning and training events have been organised both collaboratively across Design Centres and locally, including a 2-day training course on “Modelling and Design of Smart Systems”, a CPS summer school in collaboration with the INTO-CPS project, or Sofia2 master classes and hackathons at UPM. Training course material and experiment results are shared via the CPSE Labs website.
CPSE Labs implemented and launched an initial CPSE Labs market place pilot, based on findings made by eliciting areas where marketplaces and related open forums have already formed, and by investigating concrete areas for marketplace pilots, stakeholders and their needs. Several Design Centre platforms and experiment developments are included in the pilot, and continued hosting is ensured by Spanish Design Centre. Further continuity is aimed through alignment or integration with similar efforts by other SAE projects.
