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Biopeople, as the national innovation cluster for life and health sciences in Denmark partnered with the other regional bioclusters in the FASILIS initiative to formulate the entire project, to win the funding from Interreg NWE IVB, and to execute the project with the enormous successes it has delivered to both SMEs and facilities.
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- To showcase the excellent R&D facilities and collaboration opportunities available in several Northern European bioregions for life & health science SMEs across Europe
- To provide SMEs with the means to discover and to engage relevant facilities in their innovation projects
The initiative consisted of four activities to promote R&D innovation in life & health science SMEs:
i. Transnational matchmaking for both SMEs and R&D facilities
ii. Open, searchable online catalogue of world-class R&D facilities, organised by keywords and areas of interest
iii. Project partnership brokering by regional experts in each cluster organisation
iv. Project evaluation and funding by regional experts, agencies, and Interreg NWE IVB
After gathering over 100 world-class facilities from the six bioclusters participating in the initiative, the opportunity to form a partnership with a facility and to win funding for a short R&D project was presented to several hundred life and health science SMEs at seven different events across Northern Europe in the spring of 2010. These matchmaking events and follow-up activities resulted in over 90 SME / facility partnerships being brokered and 69 demo- or pilot projects being funded with vouchers worth €6000 each in the summer of 2010. 24 of the 69 innovation projects involved Danish SMEs or facilities, bringing to total funding enjoyed by Danish stakeholders to over €144000. Of these 24 projects, all completed by December, 2010, 19 are still ongoing.
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The role of BioPeople during the execution of FASILIS has been to engage facilities, to promote the opportunity to SMEs, to matchmake and broker project partnerships, to evaluate applications, and to keep the administrative burden to a minimum for the SME and facilities participating, designing their tasks to be low and taking care of the bulk of the administration with respect to the project partners and regional + Interreg funding agencies. The most significant role for the Biopeople innovation cluster throughout the entire process has been that of using our cluster-specific knowledge and personal life & health science expertise to discover and to broker the best facility in our region for each SME that approached us with a project. This role has been formalised with the term “Regional Contact Point” within each of the six participating bioclusters in FASILIS.
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Both life & health science SMEs and facilities have benefitted in three ways:
i. Successful completion of 24 applied R&D projects between world-class facilities & their experts and innovative SMEs in Denmark; the knowledge transfer has been so useful that 16 of the 24 projects are now ongoing ones and many SMEs have taken their products and services one step closer to market
ii. New contacts to collaborators in other bioclusters for future projects, strategic alliances, and funding opportunities
iii. Closer ties for both SMEs and facilities to their biocluster organisations and the programmes and funding opportunities these clusters can promote on their behalf
Quotes from participants at the Danish FASILIS Evaluation meeting:
“Vouchers are excellent for testing out new relationships in a concrete & finite project framework.”
“Good as launch-pad for other applications, such as EuroStars, FP7, etc.”
“These vouchers have been very useful for introducing new technologies to our company, getting to know a foreign partner before committing too much, and increasing international collaboration.”
“The „one-stop-shop‟ aspect of FASILIS is its unique selling point – you provide both high quality information and brokering, and not just another (random) Google / Cordis search.”
“I think the €6000 vouchers are OK because they enable two partners to get to know one another before entering into larger collaborations. The amount of the voucher is too small to really make an interesting project, but as a springboard to a larger application to bigger programmes, it has been very useful. We would not have had this opportunity if we had not had a successful FASILIS project.”
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In Denmark:
Bioneer, Biopeople, BK Medical, Cytoguide, DELTA, derma veris, DHI, DNA Technology, DTU Danchip, DTU Fotonik, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Fluxome, ImmunoSigns, Inspicos, Jurag Separation, Aalborg University, 2cureX
In Northern Europe:
SEHTA (UK), BioRegio STERN (DE), BioLiege (BE), BOM (NL), and OOST NV (NL), plus hundreds of SMEs and facilities
in these regions (e.g., Oxford University, Fraunhofer IPA, Liege University, Philips Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, etc.).
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