UPCOMING EVENTS
Announcement : Partnering Day for "HEALTH" in the 7th Framework Programme - FP7
 SMEs go Health will organize its 5th Partnering day in Vienna, Austria, on 7 October 2009.
Do you intend to prepare a proposal in the health area of the 7th Famework Programme?
Don’t miss this opportunity to build your consortium of excellent partners from industry and academia – organised by SMEs go Health on 7 Octobre 2009 in Vienna.
Free of charge!
Information:
This event aims at bringing together researchers from industry and academia from all over Europe in one place. During pre-arranged face-to-face meetings, participants can initiate cooperation in European research projects in the Health area of FP7.
The basis for the meeting schedule is an online catalogue, where each participating organisation submits in advance its competence profile and its cooperation interest.
If you have missed the opportunity to attend the previous brokerage event in Prague, book 7th October 2009 in your agenda for SMEs go Health’s second brokerage event of this year, which will be taking place in Vienna.
Click here to find more information and to register.
Health Brokerage Events
 The previous Brokerage Event was jointly organised by SMEs go Health and the Health-NCP-Net in Prague on 4th June 2009.
In pre-arranged bilateral meetings, participants had the opportunity to discuss possibilities of future cooperations. The basis for the meeting schedule was an online catalogue, where each participating organisation submits in advance its competence profile and its cooperation interest. The target of these meetings was to initiate cooperation in European research projects in the Health area of FP7.
Around 120 delegates from 25 different countries attended the event with about 87 different participants being involved in up to 150 bilateral meetings. The presentations can be downloaded from the SMEs go Health website.
Successful SMEs go Health Information and Training Workshop at 12th World Congress on Public Health in Istanbul
 On 27th April 2009, SMEs go Health held its 4th Information and Training Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey.
Our invitation attracted 90 European and international representatives of academia, SMEs and other institutions, ranging from "FP7 newcomers" to experienced proposal writers.
More than 20 countries were represented.
OPEN CALLS & PARTNER SEARCHES
Eurostars 3rd call for proposals is open – Deadline: 24 September 2009
 Eurostars is a joint initiative between the EU and currently 31 participating countries, managed by the intergovernmental initiative EUREKA. The EU supports the initiative with EUR 100 million from the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), while an additional EUR 300 million comes from participating countries.
The initiative was launched in autumn 2007 and follows a bottom-up approach in all industrial sectors. It has already run 2 calls, attracting 532 proposals involving a total of 1765 participants. The majority of projects covered three main areas: information and communications technologies; biomedical and healthcare; and industrial manufacturing materials.
Eurostars aims to encourage SMEs that invest more than 10% of their annual turnover in RTD (“R&D performing SME”) to lead international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding.
A Eurostars project must involve at least two participants from two different Eurostars member countries and the main participant must be a R&D performing SME (see definition above). The project should be market-driven: it must have a maximum duration of three years, and within two years of project completion, the product of the research should be ready for launch onto the market. The exception to this rule applies to biotechnology, biomedical or medical projects, where clinical trials must be started within two years after project completion.
The third call for proposals is already open with a deadline on 24th September 2009.
More information: www.eurostars-eureka.eu
Contact: EUREKA national project co-ordinators:
http://www.eurostars-eureka.eu/where.do
European Research Council Funding Schemes
 The European Research Council (ERC) Grants aim to support researchers leading a research team to conduct frontier research projects. There are two funding schemes available: the ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant and the ERC Advanced Investigators Grant. The sole criterion for both schemes is scientific excellence.
NEW PROFILES / SPOTLIGHT ON RESEARCH PROFILES
Health research excellence in the spotlight: Spain as a Country of Bioregions
The Spanish biotechnology market is mainly divided into three components: development, manufacturing and marketing of products based on advanced biotechnological research. During the last four years, the biotechnology industry in Spain has experienced an astonishing 350% growth. In 2007 the sector employed more than 88,000 people. It involved nearly 700 enterprises and represented a turnover of around € 22,500 million.
The Spanish Association of Biotechnology (ASEBIO) reveals that between 2006 and 2007, the internal R&D investment grew by over 45 percent. 64 new products were researched, developed and launched to market by Spanish companies in that period.
TIPS & TRICKS TO TAKE PART IN FP7
Use the SMEs go Health matching facilities online
You can easily register with an expertise profile in the "SMEs go Health" database.
This database (operating since 2004) supports SMEs and researchers in identifying suitable partners for joint research projects - now in view of the upcoming 4th Call for "HEALTH" in the 7th EU Framework Programme.
It currently contains more than 1500 validated profiles.
Why update your profile now? This way you ensure that you can be identified by interesting cooperation partners and project coordinators, based on your updated expertise profile.
How SMEs go Health can support you for the next FP7 Health call?
The fourth call for the 7th Framework Programme, theme Health, is soon to be expected. The European Commission plans to launch this call on July 30, 2009. This year different calls can be distinguished: a call with topics to be submitted in a single step (FP7-HEALTH-2010-single-stage), topics with a two-stage submission procedure (FP7-HEALTH-2010-two-stage), a coordinated call of the themes Health, Food and Environment to address objectives from the ‘Africa-EU Strategic Partnership’ (FP7-AFRICA-2010), a coordinated call of the themes Health and Food for proposals aimed at research on human and animal influenza (FP7-INFLUENZA-2010) and finally a call by a joint research initiative between the European Commission and the European Cosmetics Association (COLIPA; FP7-HEALTH-2010-Joint-Research-Initiative-Commission-COLIPA).
If you would like to submit a project proposal for one of these calls, the partners of the SMEs go Health network can provide you with individual expert support during the different stages of proposal preparation.
For more details on the different calls mentioned above please contact the SMEs go Health partner in your country.
2 Stage Process for FP7 Topics
In the 3rd Health call, a new approach has been used to choosing projects to be funded for certain topics. The normal success rate for bids is 20%, which leads to much wasted effort for large projects; and so the Commission has devised the 2-stage process to short-list only a few projects and to ask them to bid in detail, with a chance of success that is better than 40%.
Become an Evaluator for FP7!
If you are a scientist working in Health industry (large or small company), you can enrol yourself as an expert evaluator for Research Activities of FP7.
FP7 proposals are selected through a peer review system, where top experts in the fields of the proposals being evaluated are involved in a fair and transparent assessment of the submitted proposals that follows the EC rules for evaluation, selection and award procedures.
Being an expert evaluator for Research Activities of FP7 is a useful experience to understand the EC evaluation system and it is generally considered very valuable. Compensation is foreseen both for time and expenses.
3rd Health call results – outcome of the evaluation of call FP7-HEALTH-2009-single-stage
The 3rd call for proposals FP7-HEALTH-2009-single-stage was closed on 3rd of December 2008. There were 64 topics distributed within 10 indicative budget lines. The overall budget foreseen for this call was €476m.
In the single-stage call applicants were expected to submit a full proposal. In total 513 proposals were evaluated.
The evaluation was carried out by the remote method followed by consensus and panel meetings held in Brussels. Three independent observers were present throughout the evaluation meetings and their report will be published on CORDIS.
95 Proposals are on the main (“funding”) list with another 20 kept in reserve. The overall success rate is 18.5 % ranging from 11% to 35% depending of the activity area.
SUCCESS STORIES / QUOTES FROM CLIENTS
Success Story from Italy
With the next Health call coming up, it is always interesting to see how project participants in the past have coped with the various challenges from the Seventh EU Framework Programme. You can consult several success stories online, in which coordinators and partners provide you with their experiences and lessons learned.
One of the selected projects is HYPERGENES. This is a Collaborative Project funded in the first HEALTH call of FP7. The aim of HYPERGENES’ integrated approach is to develop an exhaustive model to disentangle the genetic bases of a complex disease (hypertension) using population genetic epidemiology as a methodological tool. In the success story, you can read the experiences from the Italian coordinator, Prof. Daniele Cusi from the University of Milano.
If you would like to give your comments on your experience in participating in FP7-projects or if you want to give a testimony yourself, do not hesitate to contact one of the project partners.
Newsletter by Euro Top. |
Newsletter Volume 2, No 10 - July 2009
