Providing access to funding, and using our understanding of the landscape to facilitate collaboration with European markets.
Providing access to funding, and encouraging collaboration across European markets.
As the world’s largest international market, the European Union has more than 500 million people generating over €14 trillion in economic activity. In partnership with the National Contact Points and Enterprise Europe Network, KTN helps UK businesses to access European programmes of funding, which can increase the rate of delivery of new or improved products, processes or services that can grow the UK economy.
With a budget of approximately €80 billion, Horizon 2020, represents a significant opportunity for UK companies to access finance for research and development and innovation. Throughout 2016-17, KTN organised events under the Horizon 2020 programme building collaborations and bringing investment to UK businesses.
Providing access to funding, and encouraging collaboration with the European markets.
The European Union represents the world’s largest international market, with more than 500 million people generating over €14 trillion in economic activity – approximately 22% of global nominal GDP. Although we are leaving the EU, the UK is still a key player in this market.
With a budget of approximately €80 billion over a seven-year period (2014-2020), Horizon 2020, the European Commission research and innovation programme represents a significant opportunity for UK companies to access finance for research and development and innovation. It’s also an opportunity to form collaborations in new supply chains, for SMEs to build relationships with multinational partners, and gives a route for businesses to reach new markets, facilitating uptake of new technologies by end users and customers.
In partnership with the National Contact Points and Enterprise Europe Network, KTN helps UK businesses to access European programmes and informs the funding priorities to match UK business need. This increases the rate of delivery of new or improved products, processes or services that can grow the UK economy through innovation.
KTN has organised and supported 12 events throughout 2016-17, focusing on building collaborations across the Horizon 2020 programme, made up to 30 one-to-one introductions, and facilitated up to 12 new collaborations.
Iceotope and ARM
One of ARM’s strategic aims is to increase its business in the High Performance Computing (HPC) and server markets. It is working with the University of Manchester to enable the use of ARM technology in its research to develop the technologies required for an exascale level system (a very large computer running on a low amount of power). Researchers hope to broaden the availability of high-performance computing to new applications such as healthcare, smart cities and manufacturing. Horizon 2020 funding is a key to this vision and, in 2015, a series of proposals were developed to take the strategic vision to the next stage.
For one of the proposals, it was critical to identify a company with the required expertise to integrate the components to be developed through the project into a system. John Goodacre, ARM Director, Technology and Systems, said: “I regularly attend KTN events in order to identify up and coming SMEs with exciting technology. At an event focusing on Energy Efficient Computing, I met Peter Hopton, the Founder and Technology Director of Iceotope – a UK ‘integrator’ SME with novel cooling technology. Iceotope brought essential expertise to the proposal that completed the consortium and enabled the series of proposals to be submitted as a coherent whole."
Four of the five submitted proposals were successful, receiving a total of €22.7 million in funding. UK organisations received €4.7 million, with Iceotope receiving the significant sum of €1.23 million. These projects started operating in 2016 and progress to date has enabled a further €20 million to be secured from the Horizon 2020 FETHPC programme for Project EuroExa.
Project EuroExa will see €12 million for UK organisations to advance commercialisation of the technologies. Iceotope remains a key contributor to EuroExa, receiving a further €2 million in funding to develop a demonstrator of its efficient cooling systems, employ three new staff and support the deployment of a petaflop-level testbed of the new technology at STFC Daresbury.
Energy
Exergy is an engineering and technology SME. It provides services across the globe to develop, engineer, construct and operate projects that contribute to a low carbon, sustainable future. In March 2016, Exergy's Sustainable Process Department attended a KTN event focusing on European funding for innovation relating to the growth of bio-based industries. At this event, Exergy gained valuable information on the scope of funding available and identified several topics that would be of benefit to its business and on which it had significant expertise to offer.
Exergy then attended a follow-up meeting in Brussels to take forward its project ideas. With a focus on providing analysis of the requirements for process development, integration, optimisation and scale up relating to biorefineries, economic analysis and guidance on the most appropriate business models, Exergy’s success was astounding. Five project proposals have been successful in the 2016 calls and Exergy will receive investment of €1.5 million over the next three to four years, which will result in business growth of at least four FTEs.
Alongside its success in the European funding calls, Exergy was introduced to several companies at UK and EU level at the event and is currently in discussions about future collaborations.
EU Projects
KTN also participates in European projects where the topic will be a strategic priority and the project role fits within KTN’s remit to facilitate collaboration, networking, dissemination and inform policy. In 2016/17, four new EU projects began, which focus on: