About the Pilot
The Vanguard ESM Pilot initiative addresses the development of a European network of pilot plants in manufacturing efficiency and sustainability. It is aimed at sustaining the competitiveness of the European Manufacturing sector, by allowing the exploitation in Europe of innovative efficient technologies, methods, processes, and standards in production, contributing to pollution and energy consumption reduction and facilitating smart usage of resources.
The ambition of the ESM pilot plants will be to address multiple enabling technologies in a systemic perspective, making available an infrastructure that is currently not existing, due to its complexity and to the high innovation level of the industrial applications for which it is conceived. These pilots will be open to companies, constituting a neutral and cooperative playground for cross-sectorial and interregional collaboration, facilitating access to state of the art and newest process technologies to all European manufacturing environment.
Activities & Long Term Goals
Since its start-up, the ESM pilot has defined a structured methodology consisting in a mixed bottom-up and top-down process in which regional actors were called to express their priorities, in terms of pilot plants in a structured format and in line with regional S3 and the involvement of companies. Proposals were clustered considering their synergies and complementarities and inter-regional teams of European experts in charge of collaboratively develop pilot plants projects with a European added value are established. Out of about sixty regional proposals, five pilot plants projects emerged and during these years they have developed their contents. Up to now four demo cases are following the steps of the defined methodology which consist of:
i) Pilot Concept definition,
ii) Business planning,
iii) Pilots funding and implementation.
According to their status of progress, the activities that are implemented at pilot level are intended to support demo-cases with the aim of bringing the projects a step forward. To achieve this goal pilot coordinators and demo-case coordinators are working on the submission of project proposals under divers EU, national and/or regional programmes to foster the content development while at the same time leveraging on workshops and events to promote cooperation and collaboration among the Regions and the actors involved and to further expand the existing network.
The ESM pilot organises two plenary meetings every year: one to report the midterm achievements of the demo cases and the other one in December to provide an overview of the yearly progress as well as to present the plan for the following year. For what concern the ongoing project activities through which the pilots and the demo-cases are supporting their development, there are:
- Greenomed (INTERREG MED): https://greenomed.interreg-med.eu
- SCREEN (Horizon 2020): http://www.screen-lab.eu
