05

Objective: to foster the take up of IoT in Europe and to enable the emergence of IoT ecosystems supported by open technologies and platforms. 

INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP: INTERNET OF THINGS
H2020-IOT-2016-2017
Deadline 12 April 2016

What is a Pilot? 

Pilots are autonomous entities that involve stakeholders from supply side to demand side, and contain all the technological and innovation elements, the tasks related to the use, application and deployment as well as the development, testing and integration activities. 

IoT Pilots will make use of the rich portfolio of technologies and tools so far developed and demonstrated in reduced and controlled environments and extend them to real-life use case scenarios with the goal of validating advanced IoT solutions across complete value chains with actual users and proving its enormous socio-economic potential. 

What should a proposal have?

Proposals should show clear evidence of the benefits of the proposed solutions for active and independent living and quality of life of older persons compared to current state of the art based on appropriate methodologies and metrics.

Pilots are encouraged to exploit the previous work (FIWARE, CRYSTAL, UniversAAL, oneM2M, etc.) where applicable with the objective of further demonstrating the generic applicability and interoperability of these and/or other architectures, platforms and standards, and to identify where standards are missing or should evolve, as well as needed pre-normative activities.

What kinds of pilots are being considered? 

Pilot 1: Smart living environments for ageing well: to deploy innovative and user-led pilot projects capable of supporting and extending independent living at home for older adults based on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. 

Pilot 2: Smart Farming and Food Security: to design architectures to “program” or track each object for optimal behaviour, according to its role in the Smart Farming system and in the overall food chain, decreasing use of water as well as other natural resources and inputs, lowering ecological footprints and economic costs as well as increasing food security.

Pilot 3: Wearables for smart ecosystems: to demonstrate innovative wearable solutions and services integrated in interoperable IoT ecosystems.

Pilot 4: Reference zones in EU cities: Building on the past results and achievements (FIRE and FIWARE, etc.) in some cities in Europe, a large scale pilot will cover a series of cities to operate as reference zones for showcasing and experimenting new citizen-centred IoT services.

Pilot 5: Autonomous vehicles in a connected environment: to address the added value and the potential of applying IoT for autonomous vehicles in a connected environment. It should test scenarios of deployment of safe and highly and fully autonomous vehicles in various representative use case scenarios, exploiting local and distributed information and intelligence.

The budget

100,000,000 euros.

The deadline

12 April 2016

Where can I get more information about the call?

Through the portal of the European Commission and, if you want you can attend the Info Day where all the details will be given (Registration is free and open until 13 November).

In case you cannot attend the info day, all sessions will be web-streamed and recorded on 25 November 2015 from 9:30am CET.

On 20-22 October 2015, MY-WAY, a Horizon 2020 project Europa Media is currently coordinating, participated at the ICT2015, the yearly event organised by the European Commission and gathering the main policy, research and business players in the Information and Communication Technology field. A perfect networking occasion, the event was held in warm, welcoming Lisbon and was opened by Günther Oettinger, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society,  and by His Excellence Aníbal Cavaco Silva, President of the Republic of Portugal.

Several panels provided detailed descriptions of the forthcoming funding opportunities in the 2016-2017 Work Programmes of Horizon 2020, focusing on ICT-relevant calls throughout all topics. To get a sense of what was presented by Mr. Zoran Stančič, download the Power Point presentation from the event’s website. Videos of most sessions are also available on the official event page. EU funding opportunities were not the only focus, as countless parallel discussions had been organised on different aspects of European collaboration on ICT: to mention a few, small networking sessions were organised by single projects on specific issues, a pitch competition took place and the Startup Europe Forum hosted ongoing talks. In addition, two exhibition areas showcased the results of some of the most prominent projects in ICT funded by the European Union, and included booths on international cooperation between the European Union and third countries, such as Mexico, Japan, the US and South Korea. Furthermore, individual booths presented various initiatives and offices supporting research in Europe, such as the IPR Helpdesk.

MY-WAY partners have fully taken the opportunity to create new connections: we have met innumerable young startuppers and entrepreneurship enthusiasts, successful businessmen and women, representatives of accelerator programmes and several other key individuals in the European entrepreneurship ecosystem who were at the event in those days. Moreover, as part of the Startup Europe initiative, the project was displayed at the Startup Europe booth on the first floor, which attracted tens of visitors every hour. Being at the booth enabled closer relationships among the projects and facilitated the establishment of completely new connections with the public.

MY-WAY had also secured the possibility to organise a Networking session on Wednesday afternoon, in collaboration with two projects within the Startup Europe initiative: Digistart and ePlus Ecosystem. The session proved to be very appealing and fruitful, as our room was quickly packed with individuals from startups, universities and large companies, many of whom were willing to share their individual challenges and their personal experiences in confronting them.

Our moderator, David Trayford, shortly presented MY-WAY’s objectives, scope and preliminary results, and engaged participants with an arduous question: what is being done currently to support young people willing to launch a new business? What could be improved and what has proven to be successful so far?

Nick Slater, from Capital Enterprise, shared his personal experience as a startupper himself, and underlined the importance of making students excited and self-confident. Aneesh Zutshi, project coordinator of Digistart, explained how positive examples from successful entrepreneurs can inspire and motivate students.

Ayelet Sapir, representing the Bar Ilan University, added a striking view over the unnecessary fear of failure: oftentimes successful entrepreneurs have experienced failure at some point in their lives, but this has not discouraged them and has in fact helped their further growth.

On the students support centres side, Holly Knower, from NACUE, highlighted the importance of tailoring the message to segments of students and to develop mechanisms of skills building, so that the students will be job-ready as soon as they leave education. In explaining this point, Holly provided examples from NACUE, which strives to provide channels for students to find the most appropriate resources and opportunities.

Representing the ePlus ecosystem project, José Barros highlighted existing challenges for startups in accessing talents.

Last but not least, Krisztina Toth, coordinator of MY-WAY, commented on a participant’s question by stating that mentorship, as integral part of university programmes, should improve via a bigger role of student support centres. Reshaping the educational offer is a long and complicated process, but student networks can play a supporting role in this.

The cheerful atmosphere created by David helped the audience react by sharing their personal experiences in channelling young prospective entrepreneurs to their companies and institutions. The networking session was successful in facilitating the establishment of new business connections for future collaboration, and overall the whole event was extremely well organised and fruitful. For more pictures and info on our networking session, check MY-WAY’s Facebook page, Twitter account (@My_WayProject) and continue to follow the project’s activities through the hashtag #Yentrepreneur. You may also get in touch with the project for future collaboration opportunities and events: show your interest by replying to the call for expression of interest on MY-WAY’s webpage.

By: Valentina Zuri

WeHubs exploratory survey was run from April to September 2015 with the aim of understanding how women experience and assess services in the startup ecosystem and how they think those services could be made more accessible and better serve their needs. Main findings of the study are now made available by ECWT (European Centre for Women in Technology) the WeHubs partner in charge of the study, and summarized in 4 main infographics.

In terms of use and assessment of ecosystems and their services - the study highlights how women are mostly satisfied of the quality for mentoring, networking and events hosting services, while low levels of quality are frequently mentioned by almost half of respondents for  bank financial advice (61%), high speed internet access (41%), IP advice (48%), prototyping center (61%), legal advice (42%) and accounting (48%).

Other important emerging themes are related to gender biased treatment and work life balance, pinpointed in the Infographic on gender dimensions of web entrepreneurship -. 51% of women web entrepreneurs experienced gender biased treatment at least once in the work environment, often from stakeholders’ ecosystems representatives and/or bank and financial advisors. The survey shows that despite all these challenges, women have a big ability to overcome difficulties and reach their objectives: 61% of the respondents increased its level of self confidence after starting up. In contrast with the widely spread stereotype about women entrepreneurs lacking self confidence, our respondents witness how it is all about experience. In addition, work life balance is still experienced as a hindering factor by the vast majority of participants to the survey.

What measures women think would be most useful for making digital startup ecosystems working better for women? In women web entrepreneurs’ opinion, measures such as free tuition for mentorship (46%), female mentors/advisors (43%), female entrepreneurs as partners (41%), and family friendly arrangements would be highly desirable for improving support to women web entrepreneurs. For 76% of our sample, dedicated actions and services for women only would benefit the purpose of bringing more women to web entrepreneurship.

Based on these results and an ongoing dialogue with our project’s nodes, WeHubs will now proceed designing a scorecard for women friendly business support organizations, and several other services already on the agenda, such as e-mentoring trainings and tailored webinars for digital startup ecosystems.

Get access to WeHubs infographics here:

• background: https://magic.piktochart.com/output/8573069-women-web-entrepreneurship
• sample’s features & challenges: https://magic.piktochart.com/output/8513610-women-web-entrepreneur
• use and assessment of services: https://magic.piktochart.com/output/8521730-women-assess-support
• gender dimensions of web entrepreneurship https://magic.piktochart.com/output/8519996-the-gender-dimension
• What measures: https://magic.piktochart.com/output/8523030-gender-ecosystem