SPIRE at European PPP InfoDays

October 21 saw a capacity crowd at the Charlemagne Centre for the European Commission’s PPP Info Day. The day saw presentations on the Horizon 2020 programme for contractual Public-Private-Partnerships (cPPPs): Factories of the Future (FoF), Energy efficient Buildings (EeB), the European Green Vehicles Initiative (EGVI) and, of course, Sustainable Process industries (SPIRE). Following plenary presentations separate project brokerage sessions for each cPPP were organised.

Jose –Lorenzo Valles of the European Commission (below) related the cPPP initiatives and their work to the priorities of the new Commission. He stated that the objectives of the cPPPs related directly to priorities one, two, three, four and nine in Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s ten point agenda for jobs and growth.

He highlighted Horizon 2020’s stronger emphasis on innovation and outlined the objectives of all the cPPPs – all represented industrial sectors that were essential for both competitiveness and sustainability. He described SPIRE as the “new kid on the block”.

SPIRE brokerage
The 2015 SPIRE call will receive €87.2 million of funding. After lunch the brokerage session was introduced by Andrea Gentili of the Commission (below). He outlined the objectives of the calls and gave some hints for preparing better proposals. “Relevance and excellence were important,” he said. “Good science proposals are needed - but are they relevant? Do they match the call text and PPP raison d’etre?”

Another area that needed consideration was the potential impact of your project including how it would stimulate collaboration at national, regional and EU level and – most importantly – how exploitation of the results was envisaged.

The state of play of the implementation of SPIRE’s Multi-annual Roadmap was described by the PPP’s technical leader Ignacio Calleja, TECNALIA (below).

He announced that SPIRE is not a closed club. “We now have  some 120 members in SPIRE and we are always open to new members,” he said. “And SPIRE calls are open to everyone – not only members.”

SPIRE is aligned with main EU vision on 2020 strategy and resource efficiency and its main objectives are to enable Europe to be more competitive and more sustainable – and provide more and better jobs for its citizens.

Calls and brokerage
A series of presentations were then made by Commission officers on the various SPIRE 2015 calls and other SPIRE relevant calls in areas such as Water and Energy Efficiency. You can access the joint presentation here.

Following the afternoon coffee break a session for one-to-one brokerage and networking commenced with delegates getting down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of project formation (below). This was the third SPIRE brokerage session since the start of Horizon 2020.

For more details of the presentations made at the PPP Info days click here.

To access recordings of the sessions and presentations from the plenary and parallel sessions at the PPP Info Day, please click here.

To access a database of SPIRE relevant project presentations made on the day click here.

For more information on the SPIRE PPP and the SPIRE 2015 calls under Horizon 2020 contact the SPIRE secretariat.