IoT4Industry wins 2020 "European cluster partnership of the year”

Submitted by Guillaume Roux on 16 November 2020

IoT4Industry project was awarded the "European cluster partnership of the year” 2020 during the European Cluster Conference taking place on November 11, 2020.

Project partners were rewarded for their work in “the most successful collaboration between clusters across Europe”, during the main 2020 event of the European Cluster Collaboration Platform (ECCP). Marielle Campanella (picture), IoT4Industry project coordinator, accepted the prize and the “valuable recognition of the work that all [partners] carried out intensively and efficiently [during the project]”. IoT4Industry Clusters-partners indeed succeeded in supporting IoT and manufacturing stakeholders to develop and demonstrate innovative solutions, boosting economic growth & competitiveness across the EU.

This year’s ECCP award was notably focusing on communication activities of the partnership, IoT4Industry teams having intensely disseminated upon the excellent developments achieved by the collaborative projects’ SMEs, industrials and R&D stakeholders. The entire IoT4Industry team reached out towards more than 3.000 stakeholders, enabling the wide recognition of European SMEs’ innovativeness across the Member States.

Everything started 2 years and half ago, in 2018: very concretely, IoT4Industry relies on the principles of matchmaking, training and cascade funding, to accelerate selected collaborative prototypes and demonstrators, with IoT and digital solutions providers and factories / industrial companies. After 2 open calls entirely managed by the IoT4Industry consortium, we have been able to redistribute 3,7 M€ to 84 SMEs, engaged into 40 collaborative projects, with in total 112 participating entities, covering 20 different industrial sectors.

"How to communicate on partnership"? It is both a wide and a straightforward subject and the IoT4Industry strategy has been organised around 5 main ideas:

  • Be efficient by proposing simple but and agile funding schemes to SMEs: we made our best effort to communicate in this way towards these companies.
  • Be creative, especially on social media where friendly style can create and maintain interest, while building
  • bridges among communities.
  • Be active and regular, to maintain a high attention and visibility on the project, while reinforcing the idea of cohesion within the partnership, but without being overwhelming and monotone.
  • Be adaptive: in IoT4Industry, our challenge was to attract very different types of SMEs, with very different levels of knowledge of digitalisation, via local workshops, webinars, training sessions. We adapted also our communication with the Covid-19 context : we have switched on virtual networks & events and adapted practices accordingly.
  • Be proud and enthusiastic of your project, your partnership and your results. Our strategy was to share our enthusiasm by communicating on collaborative projects’ developments and outcomes, displaying concrete achievements within our ecosystems. 

To conclude, we would like to warmly thank the European Commission via the EASME Agency for both its financial and strategic support to IoT4Industry, and the ECCP for this Award and for the organisation of this very interesting European annual conference, which is really a success in this innovative format.

Now, after the – virtual - ‘bliss’, all teams are to wrap up the IoT4Industry project’s results in coming weeks, until the official closure of the project, on Dec. 31. 2020.

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