Editorial

Dear ITEA Innovation Community,

There are many definitions of innovation with some common phrases in each, such as: a new idea, added value, related to customers/end-users. Building innovative solutions requires:

• courage to dream new ideas and accept the challenge of the unknown,
• technical knowledge to build added value beyond the State-of-the-Art, and
• good understanding of your customer needs and requirements.

Within the ITEA Community (in addition to the properties above), a positive attitude (factor of happiness) and the willingness for collaboration are the other main properties for ITEA’s impactful results.

In the Success stories of the FUSE-IT project and the 3DPathology project, you can read which challenges are tackled in cyber security and healthcare respectively and which innovative solutions have been created to build added value for their end-users. You can read courageous stories of FUSE-IT, which focuses on smart and secure buildings, and 3DPathology that moves pathology into a digital world.

The ITEA Community has presented its strong technical knowledge on AI in its projects over the past years. This knowledge base created many project ideas that resulted in 11 ITEA-led projects in the Eureka Clusters AI Call 2020. And a new Call on AI has been opened on 1 March. I would like to kindly invite the ITEA Community to contribute to this new Call.

Another aspect of innovation is end-users. ITEA is getting closer to end-users in order to support the innovation within its Community. Therefore, the ITEA Cyber Security Day has been organised with a set of customers and ITEA project partners. You can read the event report in this magazine. Furthermore, the MOSIM project explains the added value to its customers in the end-user happiness article.

Building successful international partnerships is always a challenge for SMEs. Within the ITEA Community, there are many examples of international collaboration resulting in economic growth for SMEs. The stories of Evoleo and Clevernet will show you their experiences from the perspective of an SME. And Raúl Santos De La Cámara from the Spanish SME HI Iberia Ingeniería y Proyectos shares his experience in ITEA as a Community member.

These successes are more than a coincidence but rather are based on continuous analysis and support. In the article covering the Viewpoint on Mentorship, you can read how the ITEA Community supports each other through coaching and mentoring. And in the article on the SotA Highlight, you will find the analysis of a set of IoT projects written by the Vice-chairman of ITEA.

Building up innovative communities can only be achieved by having long-term plans and continuous and agile short-term actions. Focusing on Portugal in this magazine shows us how a successful innovative national strategy is developed. The ITEA Community is stronger with the increasing support of ANI and the Portuguese partners.

I am very happy to share the successes of ITEA projects and its partners in this magazine again.

I wish you all a joyful read.

Zeynep Sarılar