Aligned with the European strategy for innovation, SMART4ALL will provide the means to join the fragmented European innovation and boost it to become a worldwide innovation leader. Through its DIH network, capacity building opportunities and novel marketplace services, SMART4ALL intends to play a key role in European innovation and Horizon Europe. SMART4ALL has designed a well-defined open call strategy to Pathfinder Application Experiments (PAEs) for supporting innovation and accelerating SMEs and startups. It also intends to establish a bilateral DIH based communication channel between market stakeholders and innovation producers (SMEs, academia, and research centers).
In this direction, SMART4ALL will offer the following opportunities and services:
• Set up through open calls three types of PAEs (KTE: Knowledge Transfer Experiments, FTTE: Focused Technology Transfer Experiments and CTTE: Cross-domain Technology Transfer Experiments) for PUSHing smart technologies to the market and PULLing smart technologies from the academic sector.
• Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS), a unique one-stop-smart-shop for experts and non-expert third-parties seeking (open-source mainly) ICT technologies that will reduce the development time of a startup/SME/mid-cap that is doing business in one of the four SMART4ALL thematic areas. In addition, AI based matchmaking and collaboration activities will be hosted in the MaaS.
• Coaching services from technical and market experts for business development of funded PAEs, from idea conceiving to proof of concept and, finally, product development.
SMART4ALL will set forward a new concept targeting to transform the one-stop-shop to one-stop-smart-shop through its Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform. Delivering novel AI based services and tools, the SMART4ALL MaaS aims to offer: (i) practical technical tools/services to accelerate design, development, prototyping, and manufacturing phases and (ii) brokerage, coaching, and guidance to access funds and pave the path towards market growth and investment. SMART4ALL will focus on the following four (4) underrepresented areas where the impact from promoting solutions with high computing capacity and low energy consumption would be a competitive advantage. These areas are: Digitized transport, Digitized Environment, Digitized Agriculture and Digitized Anything.
The SMART4ALL will be realized by 3rd parties underfunded and underrepresented PAEs. Towards this direction, SMART4ALL foresees a three-stage program: (1) in the first month, each PAE will detail the PAE major concept, define concrete steps and activities and the responsible person/actor for each of them, (2) in the core-months of the PAE, the 3rd parties will develop the application and set up the PAE, and (3) in the last months of the PAE, emphasis will be given to make the results of the PAE market-ready. The implementation of the business plans and all other activities are not included in the three justmentioned steps and will happen outside the framework of SMART4ALL PAEs. The duration of each PAE, depending on its type, can be between 3 and 9 months.
To implement its vision, SMART4ALL establishes MaaS which acts as one-stop-smart-shop, offering both technological and business services and connect a) SMEs and mid-caps that are interested in going digital to b) (Competence Centers) CCs and SMEs possessing CLEC CPS and the IoT competencies and experimentation resources and c) other auxiliary yet mandatory competencies (such as business) required to create results with a product/market fit. In this way, SMART4ALL: a) fosters customer-business-market oriented product development and b) harvests the fruits and at the same time feeds back smart specialization strategy.
