• The project is focused on the collaboration of five industrial ecosystems of key relevance in Europe: Mobility, Transport & Automotive (MTA), Aerospace & Defence; Electronics; Cultural & creative industries (CCIs); and Tourism.
• The first three European strategic and strongly interrelated industrial ecosystems, account for more than 10% of the value added in Europe, gathering 2M+ companies and 20M+ employees. The CCIs and Tourism ecosystems represents over 14% of the EU GDP, with around 3.5 million businesses and 20M+ employees.
• The project will facilitate alliances between manufacturing SMEs in need of implementing human-centered advanced technologies, and tech-savvy SMEs/startups providing innovative solutions for more resilient, sustainable and human-centric processes.

February 8th, 2024

The Kick-of-meeting of the BRIDGESMEs initiative was organised by the coordinator Iniziativa Cube in Naples from the 5^th to 7^th of February, with the participation of all the consortium members.

The 9 partners involved in the project, coming from 6 different countries (Austria, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Greece and Spain), had the opportunity to discuss about the initial project activities, the progress being made since the BRIDGESMEs launch in December last year, as well as coordinate the next steps to be taken in the coming months.

The BRIDGESMEs project, funded under the Horizon Europe programme, aims to assist European SMEs in five industrial ecosystems - Mobility, Transport & Automotive; Aerospace & Defence; Electronics; Cultural & Creative Industries; and Tourism, so they can re-think their business models and operations and become more resilient, sustainable, and human-centric.

For that aim, the consortium will start conducting an assessment to understand better the current status of these five industrial ecosystems in terms of technology adoption and transition towards Industry 5.0, and identify needs, disruptions, challenges, and opportunities.

Later, two different calls (one for the manufacturing SMEs, demanding advanced technologies in their production lines and another for tech-savvy SMEs and startups, providing innovative solutions) will be launched, to receive their interest in being involved in the project and its activities. At least 30 companies (15 of each kind) will be selected to be supported under the project.

During 3 years of cooperation, the consortium will be committed to achieve the following objectives:

• Explore collaboration opportunities and facilitate alliances among manufacturing and tech-savvy SMEs, especially in the framework of hackathons and matchmaking events.
• Increase the adoption of advanced technologies in manufacturing SMEs, offering them a personalized support, including technical assistance, business consultancy services and training programmes.
• Help tech-savvy SMEs to accelerate the deployment of innovative solutions in the market, through investment readiness support and scouting of financing sources.
• Foster inter-cluster collaboration to identify business opportunities and best practices.
• Provide guidelines for cluster management organizations and policy recommendations to enhance resilience and technology uptake across European value chains.

Behind the project there is a consortium carefully selected, with cluster organisations and associations, RTOs, universities and business innovation centres as members, being able to offer cross-border high level expertise in various domains of competence and the best value to SMEs.

The consortium partners are:

• INI-Iniziativa Cube SRL (Italy) - Coordinator
• VSB-Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic)
• AIMEN- Asociación de Investigación Metalúrgica del Noroeste (Spain)
• AV-Aerospace Valley (France)
• CNR-ISPC Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale | Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy)
• CORALLIA-Athina-erevnitiko kentro kainotomias stis techno (Greece)
• SAC-Silicon Alps Cluster, GmbH (Austria)
• CEAGA-Fundación Cluster de Automoción y movilidad de Galicia (Spain) 
• ANFIA- Associazione Nazionale Filiera Industria Automobilistica (Italy)

For further information:

Project coordination

Aliona Lupu: aliona.lupu [at] iniziativa.cc 

Giovanni Arnaboldi: giovanni.arnaboldi [at] iniziativa.cc 

Project Communication

Patricia Solá: patricia.sola [at] ceaga.com 

Sonia Piñeiro: sonia.pineiro [at] ceaga.com