Think big apertus°
Submitted by Sebastian on Mon, 02/03/2014 - 12:18
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.
Help & Participate
Go to our Horizon 2020 Wiki page or contact us.
and the AXIOM project is certified Open Hardware by
.
8 Comments
You do know that this project
You do know that this project is a participation grant? Hence you will need the same number of euro's to match the grant you receive.
With the predecessor program
With the predecessor program FP7 the funding rates for companies was indeed 50% and 75% for non profits. Now with horizon 2020 the funding rates have been unified and are 70% for companies and 100% for non profits. A 25% flat rate is used to cover indirect expenses.
That either means you will
That either means you will have an Apertus Foundation registered as non-profit with the European Transparency Register already? Because I thought the original idea was that Apertus was backed up by a for-profit company building the camera. But I kind of lost track of that direction.
We indeed already registered
We indeed already registered the apertus association (https://www.apertus.org/association) in the EU database.
Here is an image that explains the approach with company and association:
Fantastic news!
Fantastic news!
You guys are doing it all right. I like the dual NFP/FP approach too.
You can now team up with universities and polytechnical universities in Europe that are leaders in image processing and sound processing. E.g. EPFL in Lausanne has 3 image-processing labs (they have done the research for MPEG compressors):
http://lts2www.epfl.ch/
http://lts5www.epfl.ch/
http://esplab.epfl.ch/
But they also have many other labs that could be of interest to your project: http://sti.epfl.ch/cms/page-1571.html
They are part of EU research network and doing many EU research projects, so well wersed in EU fundings. They also have many industrial projects so it's easy to interoperate with them. Best is to contact the professors of the labs directly, but EPFL has also an association to help put companies in contact with the right labs and putting together EU projects: Contact:
http://www.alliance-tt.ch/contacts
Kudos also to the EU for acting towards open-source and open-data!
Thank you Beat I will contact
Thank you Beat I will contact them. Its's also possible to contact ETH Zürich it's just 500m away from my workplace but i don't know how the rules are from the University itself (Intellectual property).
Do you study or work there at the EPFL?
Just curious, have you been
Just curious, have you been able to complete and send in your application? And is so, has it been granted, or not, what did you learn from that? We are in a similar situation, creating open source health wearables, but look at smaller funds and grants primarily, not Horizon 2020, so that's why my curiosity.
Yes we applied and got the
Yes we applied and got the grant!
https://www.apertus.org/axiom-gamma
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