Exciting Two-Day GREENET Event: SMEs & Synergies!

On 18 June in Brussels, GREENET co-organised the Tech4SmartCities brokerage event for SMEs and researchers working on smart cities topics (digital, energy, building, mobility…). In this context, GREENET organized a lunchtime workshop for potential applicants on the main currently open Horizon Europe Cluster 5 Calls for Proposals, which was also the opportunity to present the GREENET project, tools, and most of all the Partner Search Database which immediately saw a surge in registrations! Participants also had the opportunity to ask their questions about Horizon Europe project to the GREENET representatives present at the session: Frankie Borg, Noemi Tesauro, Sabrina Bijlsma and Camille Dehestru. The rest of the day saw many B2B meetings – an intense matchmaking day hopefully leading to many high-quality Horizon Europe applications in the coming months! 

On 19 June, GREENET held its EEN-NCP Meet & Exchange event, this time more focused on advisors (NCPs and EEN advisors) rather than applicants. Organised in hub.brussels, this event was the opportunities to present the GREENET and EEN networks, and the respective responsibilities, objectives and tools at the disposal of the advisors. This was the basis for lively and constructive discussions around the topic of fostering synergies between our two networks, to better serve our applicants and better reach newcomers to Horizon Europe!  

• Advisors agreed on the need for both networks to be fully aware of each other’s existence, objectives and concrete services in order to better serve our respective clients, and to keep the other network in mind from the design phase of our activities in order to fully exploit synergies.  
• One of the most obvious mutual gain from EEN-NCP collaboration lies in the prospection: sharing our networks to reach newcomers. Both EEN advisors and NCPs are “on the frontline”, in direct contact with clients. For instance EEN advisor are in touch with the SME clients that could be relevant for Horizon Europe funding (Pillar II Clusters or 3rd pillar). Inversely, NCPs are in touch with researchers / spinoffs / SMEs that could also be interested in EEN services.  
• A lot to be gained in sharing our networks in an educated way – for this to be optimal, we need to know what the other can offer and which types of profiles/projects would be relevant for our counterparts. But for this to happen, NCPs should make an effort to “speak the SMEs’ language” when communicating to them: give best practices, success stories, concrete examples of possible collaborations and possible client profiles… As they have different concerns than for instance universities, their approach is different. 
• A common block for SMEs’ participation in Horizon Europe is that topics are usually “top-down” and too strictly phrased. SMEs would be more incentivized to join if there were some “open topics” in Pillar II Clusters, like in Pillar III. This way, it is easier for them to include their own projects. 

Stay tuned if you are a Cluster 5 NCPs: the “GREENET EEN-NCP Best practices guide” will soon be available on the GREENET website!