The first ITEA 3 Call opened with promising project ideas!
The Project Outline Preparation Days 2014, held in Amsterdam on 23 and 24 September, successfully kicked off the first ITEA 3 Call for projects. 272 participants from a record total of 20 different countries actively participated in the event's sessions and discussions. It was the first time that Canada took part; Carole Morneau of the Canadian National Research Council invited participants to engage in European-Canadian cooperation in ITEA.
In a historic venue, the Beurs van Berlage, the participants were cordially welcomed by Mike Timmermans, Manager for International Innovation and EUREKA National Project Coordinator of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. The plenary session that followed introduced participants to ITEA and the structure of the event.
After this short plenary introduction, the participants took the lead! Around 50 project ideas were presented during the poster session and the two parallel project idea pitch sessions. Day 2 again started with a short plenary session, mostly focusing on how to prepare an actual PO using the improved ITEA Community website and templates. The rest of the day participants were given ample opportunity to further discuss their project ideas and form the first project consortia. The lively group discussions resulted in 23 plenary project idea presentations, some of which were already presented at the end of day 1, while others were held at the end of day 2.
Key topics that arose during these two days were Software Engineering, Smart Cities, Smart Energy, Security, Risk & Crisis. Relatively new topics for ITEA like Retail and Industry seem very important for this first Call. Some important topics for ITEA such as Health & Wellbeing and Media were less prominent during the event but overall it can be said that this year’s PO Days gave a positive outlook for ITEA 3 Call 1.
As in the past years, the event was evaluated well with a high overall score of 3.9 out of 5.0 (51% questionnaire response). In general, feedback was mostly positive. Improvements for next year are still to be made in e.g. clustering of project ideas, enhancing the project idea tool with a search option and in structuring (information about) the pitch and group sessions to further support the attendees.
ITEA 3 Call 1 is open now!
The submission deadline for the Project Outlines is 31 October (17:00 CET).
Are you still looking for partners, wanting to join a proposal or have another question about the Call? Please contact the ITEA Office for further assistance or reach out to the ITEA Community via our Linkedin Group or Twitter.