Partnership between the private sector (mainly the SMEs) and the academic institutions is considered as an ideal combination for the technology-based co-operation for the FP project proposals preparation. Eastern Slovak company PROCESNÁ AUTOMATIZÁCIA a.s. Košice has started a co-operation with the Technical university in 2003 and nowadays the company participates in two FP funded projects benefiting from the structures built under this co-operation.
The company
PROCESNÁ AUTOMATIZÁCIA, a. s., Košice (PA), is an IT SME company established in 1992. Currently it has 110 employees and 85 % of them are multilingual IT specialists with a university education. PA has a certified quality management system (ISO 9001:2000). The company is a partner of the Technical University of Košice – in the area of R&D projects (solutions for metallurgical industry - key player in the area is U.S.Steel Košice).
PA provides design, development, implementation, service and maintenance of control and information systems for various industries, systems for planning, management and optimisation of production, material flow and warehouses, complete systems for logistics, transport, software integration, outsourcing, training and consultancy in the IT area. Continue reading ‘PROCESNÁ AUTOMATIZÁCIA: Development of projects through industry - academy partnership’
Régens Rt. [www.regens.hu] is a Hungarian SME which has been consistently increasing its market share in the field of logistics information systems and related fields since its foundation in 1993. Today Régens is a steadily growing company with 35 employees and EUR 1.6m in turnover. One of the key elements in Régens’s success is an emphasis on - and constant investment - in innovation.
Régens is one of the relatively small number of Hungarian SMEs in the IT sector that believe in innovation as a source of competitiveness and have acted consistently with this belief. New products mark this all along the history of the company. One of these products, the Régens CUSTOM[r]S customs system, won the Hungarian Innovation Award in 2002.
Though there have been some Hungarian grants available for innovation support earlier, a new window of opportunity opened in 2004 when Régens realised the potential in the FP6 program of the European Union (though Hungarian organization could participate in the Framework Program as early as of FP4, this was not widely known outside the academic community).
Thus the company has started to explore FP6 opportunities in early 2004, and by early 2006 they became really successful in participating in winning consortia.
One key to this success has been to hire a dedicated person as an international project coordinator whose main task was to build a knowledge base of FP6 opportunities and practical knowledge as well as to actively search for appropriate collaborators and build a network of potential partners in proposals. The coordinator started visiting FP6 events in Hungary as well as international FP6 events. She established contact with a number of FP6 SSA projects in Hungary and was also an active initiator of an SME network established for exchanging FP6 experiences.
These efforts resulted in Regens taking part in several FP6-IST, FP6-SME, CRAFT and e-Ten proposals over the past two and half years, many of which were indeed successful. One of these is FLUID-WIN, a project which aims at developing an innovative B2B solution in the field of logistics.
Régens builds heavily on innovation in the company strategy, even to the extent that they explicitly integrate innovation activities into their competitive advantage offering and PR activities. Ms. Réka Moksony (moksony.reka@regens.hu) now heads the business development division. She also happens to be the dedicated person the company hired to build the FP6 knowledge of Régens, looks positively into the future and always welcomes potential partners for innovative projects.
Loading ...
Recent Comments