Oct 24 2006
The first transnational co-operation project of the European initiative EraSME is starting now. EraSME is a co-operation between more than 20 European funding agencies running or at least planning SME-oriented programmes. The aim of the project is to foster international co-operation between SMEs and RTOs (research or technology organisations) or universities. Transnational joint projects are supported concertedly by several countries; the money comes from the various national support programmes. Each country brings its own support programme into the common pilot project.
EraSME launched a Consortia Pilot Joint Call for project proposals some months ago. Nine projects out of 25 were preselected for funding. AppSN (Application Enablers for Rapidly Developed Sensor Networks) was the first project to start. The project will be funded by the Swedish and the German government and supervised by the agencies VINNOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems) and VDI/VDE-IT (VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH). Germany participates in EraSME with the InnoNet programme of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. The swedish partner VINNOVA is participating with the AIS programme.
The project partners will develop tools for designing, testing and managing wireless sensor networks on the basis of technologies and components (ScatterNodes). These tools will be tested in several pilot applications in different areas. The consortium consists of the coordinator SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science), the FU Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) and the companies Scatterweb (D), Electronic Guard Center (S), EightCut (S), Communication Research Labs Sweden (S) and Ericsson (S).
After the Consortia Pilot Joint Call, the EraSME project launched a second call named Food for Better Human Health. Ten proposals had been submitted by the September 15 deadline. Parallel to the evaluation of these proposals, a third Call of the EraSME project is in preparation. The deadline of the call will probably be February 15. More information will be published in a pre-announcement at the beginning of November.
EraSME is the first test of transnational support which takes into account the specific innovation systems of the different countries.
http://www.era-sme.net//public