Speed UP! Europe (SPEEDUP_EUROPE)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures
Action type: Combination of CP & CSA
Countries involved: Belgium,Denmark,Netherlands,Sweden,Germany,Denmark,Germany
Call:  (FP7-2013-ICT-FI, 2013)
Start date: 2014-06-01
End date: 2016-05-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 7017421.0
EU funding (EUR): 6900000.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

SpeedUp!Europe is an disruptive end-to-end acceleration and support program to foster entrepreneurial education, innovation and ramp-Up to finance • embedded in the European Commission Future Internet-PublicPrivatePartnership Program under the 7th framework, • related to Future Internet Platform “FI-WARE”, the OpenSource Generic Enablers Building Bricks • in collaboration with pan-European TrialSites and UseCases, • supported by broad actions regarding Business Behaviors, Research, Impact and FabLabs & Academy • targeting entrepreneurs and SME´s in the field of Future Internet and related products and services, • covering the entire entrepreneurial journey from idea inception to prototype development and public-private funding. The project will provide disruptive specific coordination and innovative support actions for team formation, seed funding, coaching/mentoring/training and finally access to CrowdFunding, EU financing and Risk-Finance. The project will issue and manage a call to allocate 5.52M Euros of sub grants for project teams developing innovative services based on the FI-WARE generic & specific enablers in the areas of AgriBusiness, SmartCities and CleanTech. The project is supported by a combination of virtual tools (online platform for matchmaking, idea generation and call management) and a series of physical workshops organized across Europe, where entrepreneurs can meet, grow their ideas, develop their product and receive feedback from customer, partners and investors. The consortium assembled for this 24 month project includes leading European start up incubators, business accelerators and other SME support organizations from the Nordics, Benelux and German regions, including rewarded Mentors, Coaches, Businessarchitects, as well as Experts in OpenInnovation, CrowdFunding&Sourcing, PublicFunding and VC+BA Capital. The project will also interact closely with key stakeholders such as corporate industry clusters, national innovation agencies and large corporates and associations in the three target domains. The project will reach out to multiple entrepreneurial communities across Europe and organize events with broad coverage, such as an European Entrepreneurship Summit and an inducement prize for the best projects. The data collected during the project will allow to research new theories about the impact of support program on entrepreneurial innovations, based on the type of support consumed by each team and the outcome and key performance indicators achieved by each project, collected across all sme accelerators. These learnings will be used to develop further recommendations toward European policy makers and will be published at the Entrepreneurship Summit 2015/2016 in Hamburg.

Keywords: innovation,open call,fi-ware,future internet,crowdfunding,public-private funding,social entrepreneur,agri-business,smart city,cleantech