Think big apertus°

The European Union has just launched a massive initiative to support sustainable innovation throughout the next 7 years, working with the tremendous total sum of close to 80 Billion Euros (no, that's not a typo). The goal is to enable open scientific research, leading to innovative new products that tackle the social challenges we are facing today. Can you already see where this is going and why we're posting about it here? If you've been following our twitter activity recently, you might have observed apertus° members attending several Horizon 2020 events throughout Europe.

Think big

Many people who come to our website think that we're primarily based in Hollywood, California. They are then surprised to learn that our members are actually spread across the globe, predominantly in Europe. The apertus° project goes beyond individual country borders and it is only through the possibilities offered by the Internet, that we have all been brought closer together despite our geographic separation across different countries. The declarations of the EU's Horizon 2020 program state that "open data" is an important factor before applicants will be considered for funding and support. This is their way of saying that "open source" is the future. It's a clever move on their part, where openness is being demanded in all sectors - top to bottom - from the highest state powers. With the EU taking such a stance on this matter, it is difficult - even for the last remaining sceptics - to still view 'open source' as a niche phenomenon.

Partnerships

As with all EU grant programs, there is a big focus on international partnerships. For Horizon 2020, at least three independent organisations from three different member states are required to partner up before an application can be considered. Each partner should be contributing to the project in the core area of it's own activity, where the grant covers 70% of the expenses for for-profit organizations and 100% of the expenses for non-profit organizations. For the apertus° application, we are already in talks with several candidates to enter into a partnership and we also have several more lined up that we intend to get in touch with. You can always contact us if you see a possible partnership with your company, research institute, University or non profit organization, etc., but be quick, as the next call has a deadline in April 2014 - everybody who has dealt with an application of this scale and complexity knows that there is now only a little time left for preparing and finalising the forms.

Application

We are preparing an application for funding to develop (part of) the Axiom camera in an ICT 2014 - Information and Communications Technologies Call entitled: "Support the growth of ICT innovative Creative Industries SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises)":

Innovation Actions to support the creative industries SMEs in leveraging emerging ICT technologies (e.g. 3D, augmented reality, advanced user interfaces, visual computing) for the development of innovative products, tools, applications and services with high commercial potential. Beyond the driving participation of creative industry SMEs and the participation of ICT technology providers, the involvement of research and innovation centres is encouraged. Proposals should be clearly driven by user-needs and demonstrate the market demand for the solution and it's potential for innovation. Solutions should be cost-effective, market-ready and target international markets.

What about crowd funding then?

This application does not interfere with the planned crowd funding campaign. It will (if successful) lower the risk for the campaign supporters and bring more features and value to backers at no extra cost. The call states that projects should be "clearly driven by user-needs", so our application is already supported by our planned crowd funding campaign. Since we are going to be spending a greater amount of our internal resources preparing this Horizon 2020 application, our preparations for the crowd funding campaign may be slightly delayed.

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