February 2021 Editorial – EPN Consulting Newsletter

This month the EPN Consulting Newsletter is longer than usual as many pieces of news and EPN Consulting activities needed space!

At every beginning of new year business activities resume after holidays, companies in many countries that ended their past fiscal year  start working on the implementation of new year’s plans, but this 2021 is different, it brings many more novelties: the new EU Multi-Financial Framework will see the light and will last for 7 years until Dec 2027. Thanks to the new MFF, new strategic decisions will take place and new funding schemes will start off. HORIZON EUROPE, the largest EU-funding scheme, will begin with its EUR 95.5 billion budget to fund ambitious projects that will help companies grow and the EU gain a relevant position in several sectors such as the Environment, Sustainable and Clean Transport, advanced ICT solutions, Renewable Energy Sources, etc.

All the other EU funding schemes will also start soon with new and updated strategic goals with more inter-relations and horizontal collaborations with other programmes in order to generate a more effective synergy that will help reach better results, quicklier and a cheaper cost.

With all these new beginnings, expect to read often about arrays of new dates when new calls for proposals of several work programmes will be published. The first new calls of Horizon Europe are expected this week for the European Research Council (ERC) as you can find in one of the articles of this newsletter.

The beginning of 2021 brought also many opportunities for EPN Consulting that is now coordinating two Erasmus+ projects:
• i2SustainIT – “Impact Incubator for Nurturing Sustainability” (2019-2021)
• “Collective Innovation to Fight Climate Change” (2020-2023)

The EPN Consulting Network has now a new GOLD Member: the VALMETAL Innovation Cluster from Valencia (Spain). The VALMETAL cluster is composed by several agents: Metal Manufacturers, Equipment Goods Suppliers, Digital and Technological Facilitators, Technological Institutes, Research and Knowledge Centres, Technological Competence Schools and Technological Consulting Services.

Finally, I was invited to speak at a webinar organised by the Piedmont branch of AIIT, the Italian Traffic and Transport Engineering Association. In the 50 minutes available I talked about Intelligent & Sustainable Mobility: current themes, EU vision and Future EU funding. Great audience!

A lot of information will follow in the next issues: ask your colleagues to get registered and receive the EPN Consulting in their emailbox: it’s FREE!

Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting Founder & CEO