The rationale for EU-GREAT! stems from the observation that more funding is needed to bridge the gap between research and market. Both public and private sectors must join forces to increase the number of LSIs in Europe to ultimately boost the commercialisation of new technologies through innovative products and services, able to strengthen the competitive-edge of the European Industry.
In fact, it is common worldwide practice that public administrations, in view of the funding difficulties arising at this late stage of the RDI lifecycle, have set up instruments to provide financial support for LSIs with the conviction that the combination of funds will facilitate synergies, reducing risks and increase the probabilities of complete product deployment. Funding programmes aimed at easing LSI development exist at EU, national and regional levels, but their relative importance varies with the administrative structure of the country and its current financial situation. EU-GREAT! showed that more targeted mechanisms are needed.
The concept of LSI relates to high-TRL (demonstrators), which have been difficult to finance in the past and for which the solutions proposed by the European Commission (financial engineering, mixing funding from heterogeneous sources) are still quite theoretically oriented, not widely known and difficult to implement in practice.
For those reasons, EU-GREAT! has guided to increase the number of projects using combinations of funding instruments by facilitating investments into pilot lines and related activities towards the commercialisation and dissemination of the lessons learned for EU policy making. By doing so, EU-GREAT! intended to influence on:
• The modeling of decision making processes of the different types of initiatives concerning funding and investment.
• The definition and demarcation of LSIs.
• The understanding of the funding needs of these initiatives connected to the decision making process.
• The comprehension of the funding mechanisms available to address the different needs.
• The key issues in combining different funding mechanisms.
The impact of EU-GREAT! comes from facilitating the complete development of ambitious, far-reaching RDI initiatives requiring a combination of different funding mechanisms to go from the conceptual idea to the market. This has been facilitated with concrete deliverables and recommendations to policymakers and private investors to improve the combination of funding, as well as manuals for organizations to setup investment plans for RDI initiatives using a composition of funding mechanisms. EU-GREAT! supported and guided the EC services in designing and delivering further actions to facilitate synergies among public (ESIF and H2020 at European level, programmes and initiatives at national and regional levels) and private funds. EU-GREAT! created awareness, disseminated results and validated them with experts. The EC, national and regional public authorities, private stakeholders, industry representatives and research organisations have been recipients of the project outputs.
