The project UFO, for “Emerging Industries New Value Chains Boosted by Small Flying Objects” aims at stimulating the development of new products and services for 6 emerging industries (Mobility, Environmental, Blue Growth, Digital, creative & gaming, Climate and Finance & insurance) by combining the Small Flying Objects (SFOs - Smallsats, drones, HAPS) with new embedded technologies and data exploitation solutions.
It is doing so by fostering the development of cross-sectoral value chains thanks to new solutions developed by European SMEs. It benefited from a total budget of EUR 4.3M from the European commission, including EUR 3M dedicated to the direct funding of innovation projects.
To contribute significantly to the Smallsat, drones and HAPS European growth, the project itself is based on the facts that SMEs are the backbone of Europe’s economy and we have today a great emergence of business opportunities that came up with the multitude of applications from digital, earth observation (EO) and the use of new data. In that sense, the idea is to foster and stimulate the collaboration between SMEs, corporate companies, public authorities and service providers in the emerging industries markets.
Europe is definitely a changing world and for UFO, the key success factor is therefore to create an open innovation space for the ecosystems. The objective was to offer to the SFOs, embedded KETs, data analysis and exploitation solution actors a programme where they could inform, exchange, create, develop, demonstrate, and prepare their market deployment.
During the programme, two Open Calls were launched and 25 innovative projects were selected. UFO strengthened the industrial leadership with more than 3M€ in direct funding for the creation and reconfiguration of 25 new value chains. 66 different SMEs from the UFO partner countries collaborated to deliver 21 new demonstrations and 4 feasibility studies. Among the 66 SMEs, 25 were from UK, 16 from France, 14 from Greece, 5 from Bulgaria and 5 from Romania. The funded projects covered all of the six targeted emerging industries and had the opportunity in November 2022 to foster their collaboration in a Showcase event, held at the Royal Geographical Society, in London.
