European Start-ups often face difficulties in the early phases, mostly because of the lack of high-quality infrastructure and human resources available to test and efficiently develop their technology. NEANIAS aims to provide technical and financial support to tackle these challenges.
The purpose of this Open Call is to spark and support the development of a wide variety of innovation projects, by providing novel services created in the frame of the NEANIAS project, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and contributing to advance research and innovation in Europe. The overarching goal was to build up and strengthen the European innovation community by identifying and supporting innovative projects with novel services developed in the Underwater, Atmospheric and Space research fields. Innovation in this scope may refer to (a) new operation models for existing services, that can exploit NEANIAS resources (b) improving existing services utilizing NEANIAS offerings to increase their overall offering (c) brand new services inspired by NEANIAS offerings (d) new services in need offerings such as NEANIAS and EOSC ones, and many more.
To boost the development of new business opportunities and accelerate the onboarding of external users into the project, NEANIAS has organized its first Open Call for Atmosphere, Underwater and Space Science initiatives. The first Open Call was launched on the 8 February 2021, 9:00 CET and was closed on the 9 April 2021, 23:00 CEST.
At the close of the Open Call, 19 valid participation requests have been received with a very balanced representation: 5 from Atmospheric research, 7 from Space research and 7 from Underwater research, all of them linked to innovation and the European Open Science Cloud.
The response of the interested participants also reflects a good representation of eligible countries, counting on the participation of companies and organizations from 8 European countries: Germany (2 applicants), Greece (7 applicants), Hungary (3 applicants), Italy (2 applicants), Portugal (1 applicant), Romania (1 applicant, Spain (1 applicant), Sweden (2 applicants), of which only half have been related to European projects previously.
All these requests are currently under evaluation by the NEANIAS Project team of experts. In the coming weeks, the selected applicants in this Open Call process will be announced.