• Published on 18 May 2015
• External News

Results ECSEL Consortium Building Event

In support of the presently open Calls for Proposals ECSEL–JU, with logistic support from ARTEMIS-IA and AENEAS, held a Consortium Building event in Brussels on April 14th and 15th. Despite being a follow-on – or maybe because of it - to the Brokerage events organised by ARTEMIS-IA and EPoSS in January (Amsterdam), the response by the community was enormous. In all, 431 registrations were received and 26 non-registered participants arrived, and actual official attendance was 380.

The first day was dedicated to informative presentations by ECSEL JU Executive Director Andreas Wild (Introduction), Head of Plans and Dissemination, Alun Foster (Multi-Annual Strategic Plan), and Head of Programmes, Yves Gigase (Calls 2015 Work Plan and proposal submission). These were aimed clearly at providing as much background as possible to help prospective participants put forward project ideas that fit well with the JUs objectives.

A special session was organised, which raised much attention (incidentally, causing quite a flutter on Twitter), where the floor was given to “sister” JTIs of ECSEL (the new generation under Horizon2020 of CleanSky, Fuel-Cells and Hydrogen, and IMI) and some “less usual suspects” from the European Commission (DG-AGRI) and Industry (EARPA – European Automotive Research Partners Association and AFELIM – the French association for printed electronics). The presentations were not only interesting from a technical standpoint. They also underlined on the one hand the importance of ECS across a broad range of economic activity and – importantly – set seeds in some fertile ground for future cross-domain collaborations which can potentially magnify the impact of the projects supported by different funding schemes.

On the second day, the floor was given to project proposers and (moved to the afternoon, due to the sheer number of project ideas put forward) potential partners. Forty-six (yes, 46 !) project ideas were presented within the space of 2 hours, followed by break-out sessions where the prospective consortia could get together and agree around details of the their ideas. To round off, 15 organisations presented their technological capabilities, as potential partners who could complement existing partnerships with valuable participation.

In the margins of the event, the representative of “Enterprise Ireland”, Lead Delegate of the Irish National Funding Authority in the ECSEL JU Michael Hughes, and ECSEL JU Executive Director Andreas Wild signed the Administrative Agreement whereby Ireland now officially joins the ECSEL Joint Undertaking.

At the end of this marathon event, feedback has been positive about the usefulness of this facility in helping consortia build up their proposals. A few tweaks to the format have been suggested, and we can look forward optimistically to future events of this kind.

ECSEL at CEZAMAT, Warsaw

Warsaw University of Technology, who is the leading partner of CEZAMAT (Centre for Advanced Materials and Technologies), invited ECSEL to attend an International Conference entitled “Science-Technology-Business”. The Conference was held on 20-21st of April 2015 in Warsaw, Poland.

CEZAMAT aims to inspire and initiate cooperation between entrepreneurs and scientific centres. The conference was a great opportunity to present new R&D opportunities related to the CEZAMAT Scientific Centre in Poland, its main objective being to tighten the relationship between science and business, as well as to initiate cooperation on research and the implementation of its results in industry. ECSEL JU was represented by Andreas Wild, Executive Director, and Helmut Ennen, Policy Advisor, who gave invited presentations at the conference.

(text by A. Foster)