Report and video from funding seminar

There are great opportunities for the maritime sector to receive EU funding for research and innovation the coming years, that's the conclusion after Lighthouse' seminar on funding possibilities last week.

Some 35 persons from a wide range of areas within the maritime sphere were attending the seminar last week, which started up with Åsa Burman, Lighthouse, and Carl Carlsson, Swedish Shipowner's Association, presenting the two platforms Ligthouse and Zero Vision Tool. After that Thomas Bräck and Marian Mikheil from Swerea IVF introduced the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN), the largest network in the world of its kind which among many things help SMEs to connect with each other and academia and public sector. They have a database called EEN Match where stakeholders can offer or request services and for example find partners for different EU projects.
- It's an online service which continues to grow and become more and more efficient, and we really recommend relevant parties to have a closer look at it, Thomas Bräck said.

Cecilia Nilsson, Regional Developer at the Region Västra Götaland, then took the stage to talk about EU's InterReg and EU regional fund programmes. The maritime sector is one of five that are prioritized in the West Sweden.
- Success factors are a triple helix collaboration and make sure to work very closely with SMEs. Also nowadays both these programmes focus more on commercialization of the research and innovation, according to Cecilia Nilsson.

The last and largest part of the seminar was dedicated to the Horizon 2020 programme, which was presented by Esa Stenberg at Vinnova. He gave some basic knowledge about the programme, which is the largest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020). He also highlighted several different calls within the upcoming Work Programmes which could be of interest for the maritime sector.
- When it comes to your applications, one thing is more important than everything else, and that is the impact of the project. The application evaluators basically browse forward to the section about impact the first thing they do, Esa Stenberg said. 
A standard Horizon 2020 project usually has between 8-12 project partners, desirably industry, SME, academia and institutes, and they have to be from at least three different EU countries or associated member states.

Attachments: 

Lighthouse presentation

ZVT presentation

EEN presentation

InterReg presentation

Horizon 2020 presentation