In the first reporting period, ProBIO consortium has put the major efforts in the selection of KBBE projects, collection of information on results and identification of the most interesting and promising ones for further delivery of support services.
397 projects have been detected and 76 results have been selected to be assisted by ProBIO and structured in a B3O template (i.e. Bio-Based Business Opportunity), a form that describes in detail the projects’ results, the development stage and the owner.
The project’s second period has been totally dedicated to the analysis of the B3Os and the provision of services; also a lot of effort has been put in the identification of policy recommendations collected within cases’ analysis.
Starting from the 68 B3Os selected for ProBIO support (out of the 76 results), 27 were selected for market uptake support (WP3) and 41 were selected for further R&I support (WP4).
In WP3, the business coaching provided focused on different aspects, such as: One-on-one coaching sessions towards company creation and support in Business Plan writing; helping establishing licensing deals; Helping establish other forms of Market Uptake; workshops and webinars; preparation to ensure funding; further development of results to raise TRL.
WP4 major objective has been to support the previously selected R&I projects in their preparations of accessing follow-up funding ensuring the matching with identified funding opportunities.
In period 2, 2 major initiatives have been organised: a Clustering Event (“Exploitation strategies for Bioeconomy Research Proposals”), based on topics relevant to the WP4 result owners and which had a format encouraging the creation of new contacts between result owners and other stakeholders. The second big event was the policy Dinner Debate (“Increasing impact from publicly funded research: Lessons from the bioeconomy”) in the European Parliament in Brussels involving 60 participants from the policy-making, research and industry communities.
It’s also important to underline the strict connection between ProBIO and other initiatives at EU level, such as Vanguard, BBI-JU and Platform. In particular Platform (ERA-NETs) offered many occasions to make synergies and exchange best practices.
A great contribution has been collected also from the Advisory Board that has been created since project preparation, with direct involvement of bioeconomy key stakeholders and experts at EU level.
Regarding communication a brochure titled “Helping bioeconomy research projects raise their game - an early glimpse into the lessons learned from ProBIO” has been created and published in the final part of the project while the ProBIO newsletter has been released on a semi-annual basis. The project has also published 15 journalistic articles and launched several mail-out campaigns to the ProBIO and CommNet.eu community. 2 Videos were also produced.
Regarding cooperation with other EU similar project, ProBIO has harmonised its actions and tasks with the other ISIB projects funded by the Commission and focused on similar topic (CommBeBiz, BioLINX and Columbus).
