ITEA 3 Call 7 opened with first virtual PO Days powered by lively collaborating ITEA community
On 7 September, ITEA 3 Call 7 opened with the Online ITEA PO Days 2020, which was held from 7-11 September 2020. As it was not possible to get together with the ITEA Community, this year the ITEA PO Days were organised online. During five days participants could learn more about ITEA, its upcoming Call, the submission process and most important of all, about new project ideas. Despite the change in format ITEA Community clearly showed its agility and made a big step towards a set of high-quality project proposals for the upcoming Call!
A changed format with recurrent strong demand
A total of 77 project ideas were presented via the ITEA Project idea tool, online posters and video pitches, and the high number of online workgroup sessions gave our Community members the chance to meet online and start shaping their consortium and further develop their idea towards a successful project outline. . A record number of 338 participants from over 20 countries joined the online event, with the highest participation coming from Turkey, the Netherlands, Germany and Canada, but other countries showed an increase in participation as well this year. In addition to established participants from previous year, the Online ITEA PO Days have been able to secure 51% newcomers which shows the openness of the Community once again.
Encouraging figures
For the Online ITEA PO Days 2020, extra features were created to facilitate the online event and project creation, like online poster and pitch areas, online working group session overviews, country information sessions and webinars providing instructions and tips and tricks towards successful ITEA projects. The 79 online workgroup sessions that were held over the five days resulted in 18 final-results presentations in the closing webinar on Friday.
The project ideas were clustered by 7 societal challenges, i.e. Safety and security, Smart cities, Smart communities, Smart engineering, Smart industry, Smart health and Smart mobility. Although each challenge was well covered, the number of Safety and Security project ideas was remarkably high (24), showing the impact again of this year's ITEA Customer workshop on this topic. Like previous years, Smart health (15), Smart Engineering (13) and Smart Industry (10) remain important topics for the ITEA Community as well. Although a Eureka Clusters AI Call was organised in June earlier this year, AI remains a big topic in ITEA 3 Call 7, covered by 27 out of 77 ideas.
A New ITEA Vice-chairman
The Online ITEA PO Days offered the perfect opportunity to welcome and introduce the new ITEA Vice-chairman, Jean-François Lavignon. He will succeed Philippe Letellier, who was the ITEA Vice-chair since 2008. Jean-François Lavignon took the opportunity during his debut to tell he is very excited to work with the ITEA Community and to add new chapters to the ITEA research and business success story.
ITEA awards of Excellence
On the third day, resigning ITEA Vice-chairman Philippe Letellier hosted a special webinar dedicated to the ITEA Awards of Excellence. This year's awards winners are: ENTOC, Flex4Apps, MOS2S and PS-CRIMSON. Zeynep Sarılar “handed over” the 2020 ITEA Award of Excellence to four ITEA projects for their impressive results with great benefits for industry and society. The online ceremony session was the perfect moment to discover the great results achieved by the winning projects and to learn from the best. ITEA would like to congratulate the winners once again for having an impressive and proven track record of actual business and societal impact, contributing to a better society in their own way.
Become part of ITEA 3 Call 7
If you were not able to participate in the Online ITEA PO Days 2020 but you are interested in taking part in ITEA 3 Call 7 , you can still check the project ideas in the ITEA Project Idea Tool (NDA required). Via this tool you can contact the project idea leaders via email in case you would be interested to join a Project Outline.
The final pitches presented at the end of the PO Days were of a high quality and the first 7 Project Outlines for ITEA 3 Call 6 were already shaped on the Community website during the PO Days! We look forward to the additional Project Outlines that will be submitted!
Don’t miss a thing: watch (or re-watch) every session!
Couldn’t attend every session you wanted to while they were live? Watch the session recordings! They are available on the ITEA website.
We thank everyone for joining the Online ITEA PO Days 2020, and we hope to meet you face to face next year!