• On March 11, the call for grants to Agrupaciones Empresariales Innovadoras of the Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo for 2021 was published
• In anticipation of this publication, the Packaging Cluster held a workshop with its associates to prepare proposals for pilot projects for the call.

On Thursday, March 11, the Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo published the call for grants to Agrupaciones Empresariales Innovadoras of 2021 (see extract), a call that supports small and medium-sized companies throughout Spain to improve their competitiveness through of innovative projects, hand in hand with cluster entities.

This call has a total budget of 8,000,000 euros for initiatives in line with the National Strategy for Connected Industry 4.0, assessing those projects that develop industrial processes with new technologies, increasing production quality and efficiency.

In the last call, the entity presented 6 project proposals with 16 stakeholders in the packaging ecosystem, with winning proposals such as SmartLabels, which was positioned as the second best valued project of the more than 250 applications. On March 29, the results achieved so far will be presented at the “SmartLabels. Innovation in smart labels for the wine sector”.

To prepare for this year's call, the cluster organized a session on March 9 with its members to explain the grant, present two success stories such as the aforementioned SmartLabels and Packvision, and an online workshop in which 10 interesting project ideas for the packaging sector.

Cristina Casellas, Technological Promoter of the Eurecat Technological Center, stated during the session that: “with this project we will be able to solve the problem of counterfeiting wine bottles while obtaining quality information for users and the client company through the product traceability, with the introduction of NFC technology and unique two-dimensional codes on product labels”.

On the other hand, Aleix Triana, CEO of Industrias Plásticas Triana, concluded his presentation by thanking the figure of the cluster: “in our case, it is the third year that we presented ourselves to the AEI call and the third year that we won. This is due not only to the fact that the projects presented are attractive, but also to the well-done work of the cluster in preparing the proposal, discarding ideas, explaining and guiding us throughout the process".

If you have an idea in mind that can be adjusted to the new Connected Industry context in the packaging field, write us at [email protected] with: a summary of the idea, project objectives, tasks to be carried out and possible consortium; and we will get in touch with you.