Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GALACTICA (Smart Industrial innovation as enabler to drive new value chains for textiles and aerospace)
Período documentado: 2021-12-01 hasta 2023-02-28
GALACTICA, a Horizon 2020 INNOSUP funded project, aimed at demonstrating the viability of new industrial value chains regarding the textile and aerospace sectors based on advanced manufacturing across Europe.
Development of new industrial value chains is of utmost importance for industries with low production volumes like textile and aerospace to remain competitive. Particularly, they both need to avoid focusing on red ocean market driven by low-cost and mass-volume applications. Both sectors have untapped growth opportunities that follows blue ocean strategies to drive new value chains with smart sensors, intelligent machinery, the industrial IOT transforming the transportation business models and even the servitization models as game-changers in both textile and aerospace, even in production technologies. This way, GALACTICA project arises as a total game-changer for the European textile, manufacturing and aeronautics sectors as it will allow unlocking its full potential through new cross-sectorial applications and value-chains.
GALACTICA aimed to bring advanced technologies and materials as transformation pathways in textile and aerospace value chains through advanced manufacturing
A major goal was to bring closer together textile and aerospace in route towards high added-value products and services, that can address green and digital transitions in a broad approach. The holistic approach by GALACTICA, enabled the excellent collaboration among the different sectors through its organzied series of Learning Expeditions, cross-sectoral workshops, a community platform, hackathons, etc. and supported its deployment through acceleration vouchers: Pioneer Acceleration and Orbital Projects.
GALACTICA’s strategy was:
1. Cultivation within an open collaboration space.
2. Grants complemented with coaching to assess the feasibility and small technical tests of a new value chain.
3. Large scale demo of the new value chain with dedicated grant for SME consortia with coaching.
4. Scale-up support to leverage additional funds. GALACTICA connecting SMEs with private investors.
Development of new industrial value chains is of utmost importance for industries with low production volumes like textile and aerospace to remain competitive. Particularly, they both need to avoid focusing on red ocean market driven by low-cost and mass-volume applications. Both sectors have untapped growth opportunities that follows blue ocean strategies to drive new value chains with smart sensors, intelligent machinery, the industrial IOT transforming the transportation business models and even the servitization models as game-changers in both textile and aerospace, even in production technologies. This way, GALACTICA project arises as a total game-changer for the European textile, manufacturing and aeronautics sectors as it will allow unlocking its full potential through new cross-sectorial applications and value-chains.
GALACTICA aimed to bring advanced technologies and materials as transformation pathways in textile and aerospace value chains through advanced manufacturing
A major goal was to bring closer together textile and aerospace in route towards high added-value products and services, that can address green and digital transitions in a broad approach. The holistic approach by GALACTICA, enabled the excellent collaboration among the different sectors through its organzied series of Learning Expeditions, cross-sectoral workshops, a community platform, hackathons, etc. and supported its deployment through acceleration vouchers: Pioneer Acceleration and Orbital Projects.
GALACTICA’s strategy was:
1. Cultivation within an open collaboration space.
2. Grants complemented with coaching to assess the feasibility and small technical tests of a new value chain.
3. Large scale demo of the new value chain with dedicated grant for SME consortia with coaching.
4. Scale-up support to leverage additional funds. GALACTICA connecting SMEs with private investors.
GALACTICA has conducted a broad set of activities to facilitate cross-sectoral innovation to drive new value chains. This includes the preparation and publication of market assessment for the three sectors involved (textile, aerospace and advanced manufacturing), which was the starting point to further support with innovation vouchers SMEs.
GALACTICA has launched two Open Call for proposals that consisted of two different types of funding instruments, in the form of lump-sum vouchers:
• Pioneer Acceleration voucher to support the exploration of new cross-sectoral value chains with focus on developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Each Pioneer Acceleration voucher had a maximum budget of 20k€ per project. 32 projects have been funded.
• Orbital Projects voucher aims to support the demonstration of new cross-sectoral value chains connecting the different sectors of GALACTICA with initial market tests of the products and services developed. Each Orbital Project had a budget up to 100k€ and we funded 19 projects.
Overall, GALACTICA has supported 51 projects involving 82 SMEs from the three sectors of GALACTICA, from 18 different countries. Together with the financial support, GALACTICA has provided coaching and scale-up support mechanisms including a strong featuring of all projects in the final event through a competition for both posters (open to all) and pitching (with pre-selection).
During the project, the project has awarded 3M€ including: the abovementioned funding mechanism for open calls (2,78M€), travel vouchers (55k€), hackathon prizes (95k€ in 2 hackathons), and 75k€ in prizes for the final event competition.
Several activities have been conducted as engagement actions to funnel SMEs into the innovation mechanism. This includes the organization of 2 hackathons (1st fully virtual, and 2nd hybrid with a first stage online and in-person final), 2 matchmaking events (1 virtual and 1 in-person), 8 learning expeditions and 8 cross-fertilization workshops, where GALACTICA has offered travel support via vouchers for in-person activities.
GALACTICA project has held a strong impact monitoring system through a series of scoreboard tools and KPIs to continuously track project progress and promptly activate contingency measures if needed.
The project activities and results have been broadly communicated through its extensive social media profiles and disseminated for further exploitation.
In order to promote the exploitation of key results, a guide of best practices was developed and publish openly. Within this document, GALACTICA identified the different success factors for managing a cascade funding project. This guide has been strongly disseminated, particularly with new projects such as Euroclusters (SMP) and In Transit (HE-CSA). All results are available freely in the project website, whereas the community platform will be transferred to new projects and participants will be able to continue the networking in the upcoming years.
GALACTICA has launched two Open Call for proposals that consisted of two different types of funding instruments, in the form of lump-sum vouchers:
• Pioneer Acceleration voucher to support the exploration of new cross-sectoral value chains with focus on developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Each Pioneer Acceleration voucher had a maximum budget of 20k€ per project. 32 projects have been funded.
• Orbital Projects voucher aims to support the demonstration of new cross-sectoral value chains connecting the different sectors of GALACTICA with initial market tests of the products and services developed. Each Orbital Project had a budget up to 100k€ and we funded 19 projects.
Overall, GALACTICA has supported 51 projects involving 82 SMEs from the three sectors of GALACTICA, from 18 different countries. Together with the financial support, GALACTICA has provided coaching and scale-up support mechanisms including a strong featuring of all projects in the final event through a competition for both posters (open to all) and pitching (with pre-selection).
During the project, the project has awarded 3M€ including: the abovementioned funding mechanism for open calls (2,78M€), travel vouchers (55k€), hackathon prizes (95k€ in 2 hackathons), and 75k€ in prizes for the final event competition.
Several activities have been conducted as engagement actions to funnel SMEs into the innovation mechanism. This includes the organization of 2 hackathons (1st fully virtual, and 2nd hybrid with a first stage online and in-person final), 2 matchmaking events (1 virtual and 1 in-person), 8 learning expeditions and 8 cross-fertilization workshops, where GALACTICA has offered travel support via vouchers for in-person activities.
GALACTICA project has held a strong impact monitoring system through a series of scoreboard tools and KPIs to continuously track project progress and promptly activate contingency measures if needed.
The project activities and results have been broadly communicated through its extensive social media profiles and disseminated for further exploitation.
In order to promote the exploitation of key results, a guide of best practices was developed and publish openly. Within this document, GALACTICA identified the different success factors for managing a cascade funding project. This guide has been strongly disseminated, particularly with new projects such as Euroclusters (SMP) and In Transit (HE-CSA). All results are available freely in the project website, whereas the community platform will be transferred to new projects and participants will be able to continue the networking in the upcoming years.
GALACTICA has fully achieved its objectives and even achieved some of its mid-term ambitions, fosteriong the innovation potential across the three sectors, by giving the opportunity to 82 SMEs to lower the risks of developing their novel breakthrough ideas. 2.78M€ have been awarded to support these companies in releasing their first MVPs and accelerate their go-to-market and scale-up strategies.
The strong communication efforts from GALACTICA team have reached over 19k+ unique visitors in the website and 1200+ followers in social media. This turned into high quality participants in GALACTICA activities.
From GALACTICA Hackathon, 2 student teams launched their startups with their student prizes, both of them going through different funding stages including public (GALACTICA open calls) and private investors (raising capital both of them). This was a significant achievement.
Learning expeditions, despite COVID restrictions, were really successful and highly interesting for companies to identify cross-sectoral innovation opportunities and lead to generation of some cross-sectoral collaborations for the open call.
In total, GALACTICA supported 51 projects (Orbital Projects and Pioneer Projects) from 82 SMEs from 18 countries (17 EU member states countries and UK).
This financial and non-financial support through coaching has accelerated the test and market launch of several of the innovative products and services, which are still scaling up and (within the last year of the project) has allowed 9 SMEs to receive follow-up investments or funding either through public or private capital leverage, for a total of 4.069.000 € (90% of which from private funding), which is remarkable and expected to keep growing in the coming months and years. In addition, 41 SMEs demonstrated in real environment the market readiness.
New value chain created have been grouped into 4 big groups for communication purposes including: circular textiles, space, smart textiles and lightweight materials. A guide explaining the key integrations have been published for communication and dissemination purposes. It is remarkable that many of the SMEs funded addressed circular economy and sustainability (87.4% which is much higher than initial target of 20%).
The strong communication efforts from GALACTICA team have reached over 19k+ unique visitors in the website and 1200+ followers in social media. This turned into high quality participants in GALACTICA activities.
From GALACTICA Hackathon, 2 student teams launched their startups with their student prizes, both of them going through different funding stages including public (GALACTICA open calls) and private investors (raising capital both of them). This was a significant achievement.
Learning expeditions, despite COVID restrictions, were really successful and highly interesting for companies to identify cross-sectoral innovation opportunities and lead to generation of some cross-sectoral collaborations for the open call.
In total, GALACTICA supported 51 projects (Orbital Projects and Pioneer Projects) from 82 SMEs from 18 countries (17 EU member states countries and UK).
This financial and non-financial support through coaching has accelerated the test and market launch of several of the innovative products and services, which are still scaling up and (within the last year of the project) has allowed 9 SMEs to receive follow-up investments or funding either through public or private capital leverage, for a total of 4.069.000 € (90% of which from private funding), which is remarkable and expected to keep growing in the coming months and years. In addition, 41 SMEs demonstrated in real environment the market readiness.
New value chain created have been grouped into 4 big groups for communication purposes including: circular textiles, space, smart textiles and lightweight materials. A guide explaining the key integrations have been published for communication and dissemination purposes. It is remarkable that many of the SMEs funded addressed circular economy and sustainability (87.4% which is much higher than initial target of 20%).