The transition to industry 4.0 and the development of the digital economy will require significant investments from companies in modernizing their production. ECSEL Joint Undertaking, part of the HORIZON 2020 programme, can help companies with the funding. The ways how to get involved in ECSEL were discussed at a seminar organized by CEBRE – Czech business representation to the EU in cooperation with the Representation of the European Commission in the Czech Republic and ECSEL on 8th October during the International Engineering Fair in Brno.
ECSEL Joint Undertaking, a public-private partnership focused on electronic components and systems, offers financial support to projects from a number of fields, including 5G networks, cyber security, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Thing or a high-performance computing infrastructure, covering the entire value chain. As ECSEL´s Head of Programmes Yves Gigase stated, the projects are based on a partnership of at least three entities. However, as the projects are bigger, so is the number of partners and large projects can include tens of partners. Between 2014 and 2018, ECSEL participants received a total of 1.17 billion EUR that provided necessary funding for projects in in five priority areas, which are transport and smart mobility, health and well-being, energy, digital industry and digital life.
Especially for SMEs, the opportunity to cooperate on complex projects with large companies is a way how to move forward and increase their competitiveness. That is the case of the Institute of Microelectronic Applications s.r.o. (IMA), which focuses mainly on the area of identification systems and has already been involved in several ECSEL projects. As IMA’s Executive Director Tomáš Trpišovský mentioned, their know-how has been applied in projects focused, for example, on the development of autonomous vehicles or remote monitoring of the behaviour of elderly people. In one of the projects, IMA even managed to become the main partner.
According to Pavel Zemčík, Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, ECSEL is an important source for funding of their research activities. With combination of European and national funding, it is possible to obtain up to 100% of the financial resources needed for the research projects. He particularly appreciates the objective and qualified evaluation of proposals and the focus on their quality, although he admits that the overall time needed from the submission of the proposal to the start of the project could be shorter.
The Czech Republic is very active within ECSEL and Czech entities participated in more than a third of all projects, mostly in the areas of cyber physical systems, digital industry, chip technology and mobility. According to Petr Očko, Deputy Minister for Digitization and Innovation of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, the Ministry will promote ECSEL among the business community and strive for an even bigger involvement of Czech entities. ECSEL is complementary to the Digital Czech Republic strategy adopted last year by the government, which aims, among other things, to support research and innovation in industry. This will be done for example trough the Trend programme, for which the Czech Republic will dedicate 10 billion CZK, and the Country for the Future programme with a budget of more than 6 billion CZK focusing on supporting the digital transformation of industry and implementing innovation into practice within SMEs.
