(Mostly) good news from CAPS14eu and funding opportunities on the edge

Research Network Horizon
, ,
1

I participated in (some of) the CAPS Conference. CAPS is Eurospeak for Collective Awareness Platforms, and it is more or less a complexity science-emergence inspired funded R&D program. I learned some interesting stuff that the community interested in H2020 might find useful.

  1. batch of calls deadlining in late August and September on topics dear to the heart of many edgeryders. Specifically:
  2. interesting higher-level initiative in Digital Social Platforms (this is part of CAPS). What they mean is figuring out how you can harness online interaction to attack societal problems like ageing or mobility.  
  3. The second call of CAPS, probably out in January 2015, is to be extremely friendly to real communities. I think Edgeryders-the-company might apply. Its creator, Fabrizio Sestini, is the EC guy who engaged with Edgeryders in the Policy Hero Challenge during LOTE2. In his presentation (they should upload it on the website, but it is not there yet) he said:
    • we only want real communities.
    • we don't want perfect platforms that nobody uses
    • hard requirement of at least two non-ICT partner in each consortium. 
  4. This call, that gives out 80 million EUR in small grants (50-150 K EUR is small by EU standards) to entities who want to do innovation of almost any kind. This happens through accelerators, that have got the money to do so from the EU. 

Any ideas, community?

3 Likes
2

Some extra thoughts and info

I received a mail from @accessjames. If I get it right, he is unhappy with the centralist thinking behind, in particular, FI-PPP (number 4 on the list above). My two cents here:

  1. There is a confusion between FI-PPP, the EU-funded innovation program, and the activities of the accelerators that implement it. The EU gave a bunch of money to 16 consortia, that contain accelerators; next, these accelerators are going to use it (after taking a healthy cut for themselves, I assume) to support SMEs in the form of small grants for innovation activities.
  2. This page is quite useful, because it lists the 16 accelerators and it includes links. We can use them to explore the different accelerators (though many don't list that much information) and figure out how to match ideas with accelerators. However, most of the accelerator profiles on this website are empty or semi-empty. You can ostensibly message people, but you need to login through Linkedin or Facebook (seriously, European Commission?). 
  3. It is not clear what they are supporting there. Here they say "application development", but then the F6S site speaks the language of business startups: accelerating program etc.

For now, I put in a question about how to contact these people at the Horizon 2020 help desk (Case_ID: 0925250 / 3209348].