Created in 1986, Vibratec is a French SME performing in the acoustic and vibration sector. It currently employs 50 persons. The company provides a range of services such as measurement, diagnosis, modelling or simulations, mainly to transport constructors.
Continue reading ‘Vibratec: Participating in European projects is a long run investment’
Author Archive for Julie Koeltz
The European Commission is going to hold a public hearing on future EU patent policy on the 12th of July 2006. This public hearing is following a public consultation launched in January 2006 with the aim of collecting stakeholders’ views on the patent system in Europe and of seeking views on what measures could be taken in the near future to improve this system.
Continue reading ‘The European Commission’s public hearing on future patent policy’
The ICARE project is a Collective Research project involving fourteen SMEs and seven research-centres as well as five European industrial association/groupings - representing 9200 SMEs - which will be responsible for training their members and disseminating the project’s outputs. ICARE received a financial support from the FP6 amounting to 2 million euros in a view (i) to develop a rapid and cost-effective analytical method that will enable SMEs to monitor Neo-Formed Contaminants (NFC) accumulation during the heat treatment of food and (ii) to perform pre-normative research, providing EU regulatory authorities with a fast method for NFC quantification.
Continue reading ‘ICARE: A research project intended to agro-food SMEs’
Priceminister is a website that allows private individuals or professionals to buy and to sell to each other cultural and entertainment products. At start, Priceminister was only targeting cultural products (books, CDs, DVDs) but is now offering wider ranges of products, especially multimedia hardware. The specificity of Priceminister is that they have a database of “product sheets” (including the bar code or SBN code) which are continuously created by users themselves.
The advantages of e-trade services are numerous (no stock, no logistics, and no requirement for working capital). Nevertheless, because they only charge 15% on each transaction, Priceminister has to deal a very large volume of products and, for this reason, had to make an initial investment in marketing. As they did not have any personal assets and had already hired people, Priceminister?s partners sought for business angels’ assistance. Luckily, business angels were reactive and knew the sector very well so that they understood the logic of entrepreneurship and of their business.
Continue reading ‘Priceminister only financed by business angels’
The Sheffield Hallam University was the coordinator of the two-year CRAFT project entitled “Low Voltage Accelerated Curing Systems for Concrete” (LOVACS), which involved 7 SMEs from United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Czech Republic and Poland. The project was awarded about a year ago.
The Invest in France Agency (AFII) has recently published a report in Franceon Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) which reveals that foreign investors have much more confidence in France?s economic potential than French actors have themselves!
With FDI amounting to 40 billion euros in 2005, France ranks as the fourth most attractive country for foreign investments, behind Great Britain - which enjoyed an exceptional score thanks to an important merger in the energy sector (Shell) - China and the United States. Since 2002, France has positioned itself around the third rank after the United States and China. According to the AFII, completed inward investment projects in France have increased by 12.4 % over 2004 with a record 664 projects creating or safeguarding 33,296 jobs.
Continue reading ‘France remains one of the most attractive countries for foreign investments’
Launched in October 2005 by DG Enterprise and Industry, Europe INNOVA is an initiative for innovation professionals under the thematic “Structuring the European Research Area” of the 6th Framework Programme. It aims at providing policy makers, innovation intermediaries and enterprises with data and surveys on innovation. This project adopts a sector-based approach and tends to develop networking on innovation in the all Europe. More than 800 innovation professionals from 23 Member States are involved in this initiative.
eGovernment implementation in all European countries is about to create a substantial market for ICT sector companies. Reasons for using ICTs in public sector are numerous. First, governments, at all levels, are urged to cut expenditures in order to reduce fiscal burden while they have to optimise access to information and “customer” care. Thus, governments have faced pressure to improve the professionalism with which government agencies are managed, notably through the use of ICTs.
Although governments seem committed to fulfil the implementation of eGovernment, they still lack accurate strategies to achieve the set-out targets. The first challenge for governments is to solve issues of horizontal fragmentation (policy areas) and vertical regionalization when setting-up eGovernment. Secondly, as governments are under constant pressure to reduce their expenditure, they often shift in favour of implementing open source software.
Continue reading ‘Opportunities for ICT suppliers in the public sector’
The European Commission issued, on 13 February 2006, a communication on interoperability for pan-European eGovernment services (COM (2006) 45 final). The communication calls upon Member States to collaborate so that interoperability is realized at European level.
Although much progress has been made on eGovernment at all levels of public administration in Europe, the Commission is now paying attention to the development of the cross-border dimension of eGovernment. In its communication, the Commission argues for closer collaboration between administrations from different Member States to support the emergence of better services for European citizens and businesses and a more efficient implementation of EU policies.
Reverting to the various approaches for succeeding in FP projects presented or underlined in the last weeks, let me draw your attention on two criteria: scientific excellence and project relevance.
The case study proposed below shows how seven SMEs have succeeded in taking and responding to their contemporary societal and industrial challenges through an ambitious cooperative project (FLEX-EMAN).
This project’s context is characterised by the following statement: the electronics manufacturing sector has seen significant changes over the past two years. Besides, the extensive development of IT and electronics markets have resulted in the creation of multinational manufacturing service providers, the migration of volume operations to low-cost locations outside the EU and in the evolution of manufacturing technology only suited to high volume production.
Continue reading ‘New prospects for electronics manufacturing SMEs in the EU-15′
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