Message from our Chairwoman

ITEA has a strong innovation Community to foster software innovation and digital transition. This Community is led by industry and supported by national Public Authorities to build up innovative RD&I projects via international collaboration. 25 years ago, ITEA was established on the basis of trust between industry and Public Authorities with a bottom-up model that creates a free zone for software innovation and economic and societal impact for countries, companies, organisations and people. And since then, ITEA projects have proven the value of this trust by achieving impactful results.

In this report, you can find these impactful results in the four Impact stories that were published in 2022. In these stories, you will find global standards, increased human resources, training for new innovative methods and game-changing products, services and processes that were built by the ITEA Community via ITEA projects. Some highlights:

• A platform developed in PS-CRIMSON that serves as a single entry point for city representatives, allowing them to take a virtual walk through a 3D model of the city and see everything which is happening in a single view.
• Kiswe has increased its human capacity to over 70 FTE globally since their participation in the MOS2S project and was named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2021.
• Through the results of the SPEAR project, energy costs have been reduced by roughly 10% thanks to the smart selection of energy sources, the smart adaptation of process-relevant parameters and the reduction of power peaks.
• The APPSTACLE project developed the KUKSA platform, which unifies technologies across the vehicle, IoT, cloud and security domains to provide an open-source ecosystem to developers which addresses the challenges of the electrified and connected vehicle era.

As a Eureka Cluster, ITEA is bottom-up, market-oriented and result-driven. Therefore, we focus on the urgent needs of end-users and customers to ensure that ITEA projects create impactful solutions for real economic and societal challenges. In 2022, to build a bridge between the ITEA Innovation Community and end-users, ITEA hosted events like a webinar on Smart Systems Engineering, the ITEA Smart Health customer workshop and the ITEA Smart City Advisory Board and ITEA Cyber Security Advisory Board meetings, during which innovative project ideas were created and the solutions and benefits of ITEA projects were presented to end-users.

In 2022, ITEA co-led the first ECP Joint Call on Sustainability with Xecs. The Call led to 11 labelled projects, of which ITEA was involved in eight. In four projects, ITEA has been selected as the main Cluster and, in four other projects, ITEA was selected as the supportive secondary Cluster. Although the average project size in this Joint Call is smaller than the ones in ITEA’s bottom-up Calls, it has brought new participants to the ITEA Community, which is of great value.

For ITEA Call 2022, the ITEA Community gathered at the ITEA PO Days 2022 in Helsinki with ambition and passion. During a dedicated ITEA family reunion, we celebrated the fact that we were able to gather again physically. The ITEA PO Days, supported by Public Authorities with their valuable presence, created a set of strong ITEA projects. During this event, we also received the first signals of UK funding for ITEA projects, which topped up the happiness in ITEA.

Another factor we look at for our happiness is the Call sizes of the ITEA Calls. Although the Call size of ITEA 3 Call 7 has the potential to be larger than Call 6, it still needs to be improved in order to reach the targeted KPI of ITEA that was set and approved by industry and Public Authorities.

The contextual and environmental conditions around ITEA are changing continuously because of the pandemic or the national priorities of countries and the focus of our Community. To stay impactful, a continuous change is also necessary in the ITEA programme. These changes in ITEA are always backed up by our stakeholders’ feedback as this is the only way to keep the quality of service that is provided to the ITEA Community and Public Authorities in line with their expectations and needs.

To keep the quality of the ITEA programme at the level that may be expected from ITEA in 2023, a set of targets for this upcoming year has been set, for example:

• Maintaining/preserving ITEA bottom-up Calls in the ECP.
• Increasing knowledge and awareness of ITEA, its projects and their impact towards stakeholders.
• Mobilising new income sources and funding opportunities.
• Continued efforts (including KPIs) on getting the overall ITEA Call size back towards at least €120 M.
• Participating in the ECP Groups that govern the ECP execution.
• Continuing customer orientation.

All these targets and their corresponding KPIs are challenging, but if we shake hands across the ITEA Community and the ITEA Public Authorities to support each other for positive impact, there is nothing that will prevent ITEA from becoming stronger and moving towards a better future that we build together.

Have a nice read!

Sincerely,

Zeynep Sarılar
ITEA Chairwoman