The PARSEC Accelerator is a Horizon 2020 project successfully implemented between May 2019 and December 2021. The overarching objective of PARSEC – “promoting the international competitiveness of European Earth Observation (EO) companies through cross-cluster collaboration” – was to support European start-ups and SMEs to develop new EO-based solutions and to introduce them to the market. In other words, PARSEC Accelerator supported “innovation fuelled by Earth Observation”. Furthermore, the PARSEC Accelerator was designed to help companies apply EO technology to address challenges in the emerging food, energy and environment sectors. These sectors are of high priority for society and were selected on the basis of their increasing need to innovate to efficiently address the rise in food and energy consumption and the pressure on the environmental sustainability.
Why Earth Observation? Earth Observation data and EO-based services have the potential to exert a huge positive influence on European and global societal, economic, environmental, and industrial challenges, including those faced by the food, energy, and environment sectors. EO is acknowledged as a key enabling technology for reaching the sustainable development goals by 2030.
Why now? The EO sector is undergoing rapid changes, spurred by the maturation and convergence of a number of important enabling technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence. On top of this, the European Union’s Copernicus programme, with its dedicated Sentinel satellites, generates over 12 terabytes of data every day, which is freely and openly available. Consequently, EO presents an enormous opportunity for boosting the productivity, innovation and competitiveness of European SMEs.
How? To achieve its overarching goals, the PARSEC consortium – bringing together 9 clusters and SMEs from 7 countries – carried out a holistic two-stage acceleration programme which offered a total of €2.5 Million in equity-free funding alongside coaching, training and market entry support. The accelerator’s activities were centred around five specific goals. First, PARSEC fostered cross-border and cross-sectoral collaboration, enabling better access to integrated knowledge and developing SMEs' innovation. Second, PARSEC designed an innovative Open Call scheme to select excellent teams of SMEs and start-ups which were subsequently supported in delivering EO-based solutions. Third, the selected companies received a holistic set of support services designed to increase their business success potential. Fourth, PARSEC delivered 3 Large Scale Demonstrators – PARSEC Business Catalysts – providing the technological tools for the development of new products and services. Last but not least, PARSEC maximised the impact of its output through well-defined communication and dissemination activities.
To conclude, the PARSEC Accelerator has successfully achieved its objective to foster innovation powered by EO in the emerging sectors of Food, Energy, and Environment. Concretely, 15 new products and services have been created by the consortia of 2-3 SMEs accelerated through the project. The success of PARSEC as well as its benefits for EO-fuelled businesses and society at large has motivated the consortium to build on the work performed and maintain the PARSEC brand and its ecosystem in the future.
