What We Do

SMEs and Intermediary Organisations

The Vanguard Initiative offers a platform for businesses, clusters and knowledge institutes to meet and join forces in finding new innovative solutions.
Together, we aim to increase the competitiveness of companies and scale-up regional businesses in Europe-wide value-chains.
The Vanguard Initiative’s Pilot Projects offer unique possibilities for businesses, clusters, and knowledge centres to connect with like-minded partners across European regions that share a joint goal; to strengthen industrial innovation in Europe. The benefits of interregional partnerships, established through the Pilot Projects, include exploiting complementarities, project development at the demonstration and piloting stage towards upgrading and business exploitation (beyond TRL 5), opening and sharing specialised infrastructure, access to a larger community of end-users, pooling good practices as well as jointly addressing non-technological issues, etc.
The participating stakeholders in the Pilot Projects get access to exclusive networks of pilot plants, demo-sites, and partners, working together to accelerate the market uptake of advanced technologies and methodologies in areas of strategic importance to Europe’s industry.

SME Success Story Call to open on 03 June

The Vanguard Initiative is launching the SME Success Story Call aimed at facilitating the involvement of innovative SMEs in the VI pilot activities.

Financial aid will be provided to SMEs facing obstacles in their innovation processes in one of the thematic and industrial areas of the VI Pilots. The VI Innovation Voucher will consist of a one-time, lump-sum payment of 11.000 euros to finance interregional collaboration activities between at least two legal entities (of which at least one SME) registered in at least two different VI regions and countries.

The initiative, which has been developed under the leadership of the Steinbeis 2i GmbH (Baden Württemberg), will allow creating success stories through interregional cooperation to showcase the potential VI impact on SMEs, but also strengthen SME- driven interregional value chains and promote faster market uptake of products and services.

ALL RELEVANT DOCUMENTS ARE AVAILABLE HERE

Key Dates:

03.06.2022 launch of the call 
14.07.2022 Call closure and evaluation of the applications by the selection committee 
27.07.2022 Applicants informed 
30.08.2022 (latest) Signed sub-grant agreements received by the managing authority Steinbeis