1. Achievements and improvement priorities

1.1 ITEA project impact

Since the start of ITEA, impact - both on business and on society - has been one of the main ambitions. In 2021, an impressive impact on society, the economy and everyday life was again created by the ITEA project partners with the support of the national Public Authorities. Since 2017, we have made it one of our priorities to gather remarkable project Impact stories, and a total of 32 stories have already been created.

Below, you can discover the highlights of 2 projects to inspire you. The other 2021 Impact stories can be found in section 4.1 ITEA Impact stories of this annual report and online via https://itea4.org/impact-stream.html. You can also create your own personal ITEA Impact stream online by choosing the challenges, countries and topics of your interest.

---

1.2. ITEA improvement priorities and results 2021

As part of our annual quality process, several important improvement priorities were defined in collaboration with the ITEA Board in order to keep the ITEA programme strong and aligned with its goals and the innovation landscape. Below, you can find the 2021 improvement priorities along with their current statuses.

1.2.1. Finalising preparations to launch ITEA 4 as part of the ECP

For the last two years, there have been intensive preparations for ITEA 4 with the continuous support of the ITEA Community and the ITEA Public Authorities. 2021 was the transition year from ITEA 3 to ITEA 4. New KPIs were defined for ITEA 4 with additional economic criteria to enable growth through innovation via collaboration and a new challenge, Smart energy, has been added. Based on the State-of-the-Art documents of ITEA 3 projects, new potential topics have been gathered in the Strategic Vision and Technology Roadmap. The Impact Plan for ITEA 4 the future, the Strategic Vision and the Technology Roadmap for ITEA 4 were finalised and approved by the Eureka High Level Group (HLG) in June 2021.

Furthermore, a number of documents have been produced in cooperation with the ITEA bodies to make the launch of ITEA 4 possible. These can be subdivided into legal documents and documents supporting ITEA's application to be one of the Clusters in the new Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP). The first set of documents consisted of the ITEA 4 Frame Agreement, the Articles of Association for ITEA 4 and the Project Consortium Agreement, among others. The application for the Eureka Clusters Programme was supported by the Impact Plan for ITEA 4 the future, the Strategic Vision and Technology Roadmap for ITEA 4 and the Financial Plan and the Call Schedule for ITEA 4.

1.2.2. Participation in ECP groups (CC, CC Support Group) that will shape the future of the Clusters (including cooperation and a relationship with CCF)

To facilitate and support the governance of the ECP and all of its activities, several bodies have been created in which the Eureka Clusters, their Community Bodies and the Public Authorities work together to shape and operate the ECP. The involvement and contribution of the Clusters and industrial representatives has mainly been realised via the Clusters Committee (CC) and CC Support Group (CC SG). The Presidium participates in these bodies together with a selection of Board and BSG members.

1.2.3. Continuation of ITEA bottom-up Calls in the new ECP

One of the spearheads that ITEA has advocated for in the bodies mentioned above is the continuation of the bottom-up ITEA Calls in the ECP. Furthermore, this was also a central topic in meetings that were held with individual PAs and within the ITEA Authorities Committee Workgroup (ITAC-WG). The bottom-up ITEA Calls are at the heart of the ITEA Community and should remain so in the future. The concept of Joint Eureka Clusters Calls is an excellent way to broaden the Clusters’ activities and stimulate cooperation and crossover innovation between the different Communities. Still, the individual Cluster Calls are the catalysers of the different Clusters and the binder that keeps the Communities strong and alive.

1.2.4. Preparing Joint Eureka Clusters Call rules and agreements, initiating the next Joint Call(s)

ECP has added a new concept of Joint Eureka Clusters Calls, which enable collaboration among Eureka Clusters’ Communities. This new concept of Joint Eureka Clusters Calls enables harmonisation between the Call management rules of the Eureka Clusters, such as on project evaluation and project reviews. The Joint Eureka Clusters Calls are promoted to Eureka Clusters’ Communities simultaneously with the same content. The main purpose of these Joint Calls is to increase collaboration among the Communities of Eureka Clusters and improve the impact of Eureka Clusters. In a Joint Eureka Clusters Call, a project may select a primary and secondary Cluster to access the knowledge base of multiple Clusters. This new type of Call therefore needs a set of new rules to manage the Call and to share the new workload and financials. Eureka Clusters defined these rules with the support of Public Authorities and they were approved by the Eureka HLG. In addition, sustainability has been defined as the topic for the first ECP Joint Call, which was launched on 1 February 2022.

1.2.5. Continuing customer orientation through ITEA events

Since 2015, ITEA has had a strong focus on customer orientation to improve the projects, their outcomes and their potential to create impact. In 2021, we continued this customer orientation through our events by organising a Cyber Security Day, a Smart City Day and a Smart Energy customer workshop and by participating in the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo 2021 together with 6 ITEA projects. Due to the strong focus that ITEA already had within several activities on Smart cities, the decision was made to not participate in the Smart City Expo World Congress 2021. Due to the pandemic, it was also unfortunately not possible to investigate potential additional events (e.g. on Smart industry and Smart engineering). However, we are very proud that we were able to establish the Cyber Security Advisory Board (CySAB) and expand the Smart City Advisory Board (SCAB) in 2021. More information on these advisory boards can be found in section 4.2 ITEA customer orientation. These events and activities have brought ITEA even closer to the market, focusing on real customer and societal challenges.

1.2.6. Continued efforts (including KPIs) on:

• Achieving an ITEA Call 7 size of €110 m (excluding 2021 Joint Eureka Cluster Calls)
  In recent years, it has become more challenging for ITEA to maintain Call sizes that match the targeted level of the ITEA KPIs. For Call 6 in particular, there has been a decline in the funding level in some countries. Despite this tendency, a positive turnaround is recognisable in Call 7, which developed towards a size of almost €90 m in 2021.
• Minimising the time between the idea and the project start in the ECP
  To improve the processes of the Clusters, they have been reorganised into the new Eureka Clusters Programme, which should lead to better and clearer funding decisions more quickly. This goes for the Joint Calls but should also be applicable to the ITEA bottom-up Calls. The importance of shortening the time between the project idea and the project start has been confirmed by the participating ITAC members. For ITEA Call 2021 and the Joint Eureka Clusters Call 2021, we are targeting a time-to-project of 12 months.
• Expanding the ITEA programme in new countries that participate in the ECP
  Despite the disadvantage of hardly having any physical meetings due to the pandemic, a number of contacts have been made with countries that support ITEA projects or AI Call projects in which ITEA has a leading role. An example of this is Singapore, which has been involved in more ITEA activities (such as the PO Days) and now has a partner in one of the POs which is invited to submit an FPP in ITEA Call 2021.
• Press approach in combination with partners
  This year, ITEA has again teamed up with the project partners of award-winning ITEA projects and has created four press releases that can be found at https://itea4.org/press_releases.html. Based on the advice of Bosch, external press was invited to the online ITEA award ceremony and a dedicated press Q&A was organised afterwards. Although no articles on ITEA or the award-winning projects have appeared in the national press yet, the coverage has been strongly improved and the awards for EMPHYSIS and PARTNER were particularly well-covered by external websites thanks to the communication efforts of several project partners.
• Impact stream
  Four new ITEA Impact stories have been added to the online ITEA Impact stream, showing strong results achieved in different domains, pushing the Digital Transition and improving customer satisfaction. Reflexion focused on the continuous, real-time conversion of operational user data from industry into information, while the Flex4Apps partners built reference architectures that provide template solutions for dealing with monitoring and analytics and developed methodological support to help teams leverage these. FUSE-IT addressed the need for sustainable, reliable, user-friendly, efficient, safe and secure Building Management Systems in the context of smart critical sites and ASSUME dealt with the demands of multi-core technologies in highly automated systems.

1.2.7. High-level KPIs

The ITEA Office has a Quality Management System (QMS) in place; since April 2014, this QMS has been ISO9001:2008-certified and, since April 2017, the QMS of the ITEA Office has met the requirements of the new ISO 9001:2015 standard. As part of this QMS, several high-level KPIs have been defined for ITEA. In 2021, ITEA achieved the following scores for these high-level KPIs:

Table 1: Results ITEA high-level KPIs 2021.

Strategic leadership	Target 2021	Realised 2021
Forecast funded Call size ITEA 3 Call 7	> €110 m	€65-90 m
Time from idea to project start of ITEA 3 Call 7	<12 months	19 months (estimated)
Hit rate ITEA 3 Call 6	>70%	45%
Average quality of events (Smart City Day, Cyber Security Day, customer workshop, Online PO Days, Cyber Security & Cloud Expo)	>3.5	3.5

In this annual report, the sections 3.1 ITEA Programme size, 3.2 ITEA Calls progress and 4.3 ITEA Events give an explanation and more details on these KPIs and their values in 2021.