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.
