Editorial

We can look back on the recent Eureka Innovation Days in Finland as a great success, one that underlined the power of collaboration in which our global dimension was strengthened with Korea and Canada confirming their involvement in EUREKA and more especially in ITEA. All the clusters demonstrated their strong support to SME growth through a direct address organised with a set of SMEs and chairpersons. The ITEA corridor of innovation was particularly impressive with 37 projects demonstrating numerous unique innovations and strong, fast market impact, such as the MEDIATE project that received the 2018 EUREKA Innovation Award in the category ‘Innovations of Tomorrow’. Honourable mention also goes to this year’s four awarded projects: Benefit, C3PO, Idea4Swift and FUSE-IT.

We celebrated our 20 years of success stories in an atmosphere of happiness with testimonials from large industrials, SMEs, researchers and public authorities, all nicely kicked off by our iconic former Chairman, Rudolf Haggenmüller. But while it was pleasing to enjoy this long history of successes, our focus is always on the next game and our current Chairwoman, Zeynep Sarilar, looked ahead towards the challenges of the next twenty years. Have a look on the customer challenges on our website to help prepare the next ITEA proposals for our PO Days on 4 and 5 September in Stockholm.

This issue also features the last harvest of Call 4 and the impact of our new tool: the international customer workshop aimed at orienting our projects even more toward customer challenges. Rudolf Scholten, the COO of Quantib, a healthcare spinoff of Erasmus University that is in the business of mastering artificial intelligence, stresses how a programme like ITEA, with the support of large industry partners, compensates partly the general lack of venture capital funding in Europe, with success in the BENEFIT project opening the door for a major capital investment for their company.

In this magazine you will also discover the new golden age of the Netherlands, based on innovation and making strong use of ITEA to enable industry to change the game and impact the market. Wilbert Schaap, programme coordinator for the international technology programmes at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, confirmed the Dutch government’s support for ITEA.

Dominique Défossez and Päivi Jaring talk about their various experiences in ITEA, stressing our involvement in Smart Communities, the topic of our last international customer workshop where we were welcomed by Barco, a worldwide leader on cooperative tools. Read also Martin Benedikt on his successful experience with the ACOSAR project to develop a co-simulation interface for RT-System integration. I am particularly proud of their success in standardisation and, of course, the ITEA BaaS project design, an architecture that considers a building rather as a service and with a long list of market impacts. And if drones are your thing, then check the HI-RISE report.

Once again, when we speak about ITEA the best thing we can do is to focus on our projects and their successes. It all points towards a great future for our next 20 years.

Philippe Letellier