Today, innovation is to an increasing extent based on digitisation leading to new functionalities, products and services, but the speed of change is so quick that SMEs and mid-caps are struggling to keep pace. In order to address this, Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) have been set up to help companies with their digital transformation. This has been done at European, national and regional levels; however, the resulting community of DIHs is fragmented. The aim of the Smart4Europe2 was thus to bring together and link the DIHs as well as projects aligned to SAE (DEI CSAs, ECSEL, I4MS, etc.) and make DIH services more widely available to SMEs and mid-caps. Smart4Europe2s focus was on:
• Provide services supporting the SAE network including a single Innovation Portal, Market Place, Service Centre, broad dissemination activities and coaching & training of SMEs and DIHs
• Strengthen the SAE community cohesion and facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer
• Attract new stakeholders (SMEs and mid-caps) and achieve broad coverage by targeted outreach activities via own networks and multipliers (ENN, NCPs, and clusters)
• Grow the SAE ecosystem by connecting with new stakeholders and multiplying the impacts by collaborating with related projects, initiatives and networks and enable brokering
• Sustain the SAE network by creating a strategic roadmap based on a SAE Technology Radar, DIH business and collaboration models, strategic linkage of national and regional initiatives and via leveraging investment
The work expanded upon the successful Smart4Europe1 CSA, driven by a strong consortium of partners that have already demonstrated their commitment in shaping the SAE Initiative. Under the SAE umbrella there is a growing number of projects, which Smart4Europe2 brought together to collaborate and link to other initiatives, helping it to grow organically to catalyse digitisation throughout Europe.
