Not just creating projects but driving innovation

One of the initial ideas and goals of the FinEst Centre was to advance Estonia’s high-level research, innovation and entrepreneurship potential by establishing active knowledge-transfer and partnerships with counterparts from Finland. Developing proposals for the competitive research and innovation funding grants is an obvious way of achieving that goal. For that reason, it is also one of the performance indicators of the FinEst Centre.

 

Together with our pilots’ teams and our core research and innovation team we try to identify the most interesting calls that would develop our expertise and relationships with partners across Europe. Especially important for us is the cross-border activities involving cities across Europe to test and pilot our solutions. This enables our researchers and innovators to collaborate with partners across the value chain.

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For 2022 September to November deadline we have 6 Horizon Europe proposals and 2 Interreg proposal in developing or already submitted:

 

HORIZON-CL5-2022-D4-01-03

HORIZON-EIE-2022-SCALEUP-02-01

HORIZON-CL4-2022-HUMAN-02-01

HORIZON-CL3-2022-CS-01-01

HORIZON CL3-2022-DRS-01-06

HORIZON-CL5-2022-D4-01

 

Interreg:

Sohjoa 4.0 under Climate-neutral societies (priority 3)

Smart Mobility Hub under Decreased CO2 emissions (PO5).

 

So far we have submitted approx. 30 proposals out of which 6 have been funded so the success rate is about 20%. There is definitely room for improvement. We have been in consortium with strong lead partners like Forum Virium Helsinki, VTT or Lisbon Council and from this we try to learn as much as possible of the process, structure and content of the proposals. Our ambition is to start taking the lead role more often in the proposal development.

 

The projects that have gotten funding so far:

 

IRIS H2020-SU-DS-2018-2019-2020 cybersecurity in smart cities.

CitySCAPE H2020-SU-DS-2019 cybersecurity in multimodal transport system

TREASoURcE LC-GD-3-2-2020 – circular economy in smart cities

EDIAQI (HORIZON-HLTH-2021-ENVHLTH-02-02) – follow-up to DigiAudit pilot

NZC HORIZON-MISS-2021-CIT-02-03 - Accelerating cities' transition to net zero emissions by 2030

 

In the proposal development process, we are trying to bring together our pilots’ teams and solutions and match them with partners that would give them opportunity to develop and test their solutions in a way that would not be possible in isolation. As the ultimate goal of the pilots is to generate solutions for the market it is essential to have the opportunity to test them in real life cross-border setting with stakeholders from wide range of value chain involved.

 

When building up proposals we rely on our researchers and innovators to provide the excellence and solutions beyond the state of art. Our core team can help with the impact and implementation efficiency of the project and other proposal development technicalities.

 

Rough structure of the process can be visualised like this: