Wednesday, June 18, 2008, Hotel Golf Concordia, 9:00 - 10:30  

Chair:   
Mario Vilar, NCP for ICT, RI, SIS and SSH
Agencia de Inovaçao, Portugal

Presenters:
Bent Egebart, CEO
Whyse aps, Denmark
Mihael Mohorčič, Researcher
Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Organised by the representatives of the IDEAL-IST Project

Workshop outline

The Workshop addresses participants of the 21st Bled eConference with a strong expertise as background and interest in participating in the FP7 ICT Programme, but without a specific project idea in mind. The workshops aims at showing an other way to find a project matching your expertise, making sure your expertise will be extended and brought into full use.

Over recent years it has become increasingly evident that international companies, both small and large, in the field of IT industrial research, as well as research institutes and universities, require assistance in obtaining EU financial support. As computing and telecommunications converge, and EC programmes emphasis integration and application of technologies, new relationships are required between actors in the different sectors. Thus, finding suitable partners for a given project idea in other countries and different sectors is one of the most pronounced barriers to participation in EC RTD Programmes faced by potential project proposers. However, the inverse situation, where institutions have proven expertise but lack of references and pre-established connections as well as no overall project idea, proved to be even larger barrier. Ideal-ist project with its network of 49 members helps overcome these barriers by facilitating new relationships between potential participants.
The usual way in setting up international consortia starts by the originator of the project idea, i.e. to find a partner for cooperation they look into areas of interest trying to identify institutions with the required expertise.

The experience gathered in the Ideal-ist project shows there is also an other way to join the consortia, proven especially suitable for newcomers and SME's. This is enabled by the strict formal procedures enforced by the Ideal-ist project in the process of preparation of partner-search expressions, where the needed and missing skills and expertise have to be explicitly pointed out in a comprehensive way. Making use of these partner-search expressions interested institutions without project ideas can search for suitable missing expertise and skills within a much wider range of project ideas.

Procedure

We will demonstrate the other way to find the project and/or institution, by several examples from the past ICT Calls relevant to the subject of the conference and thus to the expertise of most attendees.

In the session we will simulate 3 newcomers or SME's with different backgrounds, all interested in joining the FP7 in the area of ICT. They have a clear vision on their future and well defined aims and goals. For all of them it is important to enter a project where their expertise will expand and their visions will be realised - at least partly.

In the second part of the session we will demonstrate the methodology by collecting skills and expertise from the audience in order to find proposals, where they could join effect-fully. Priority will be given to the atendees with pre-registered skills and expertise via web-based application form. This form will be asking for the contact data and the skills and expertise the organisation/individual wishes to bring into play. An invitation to feel the web-based form will be sent to registered organisations 2 weeks before the event.

Objective

The objective of the event is to facilitate communication between the conference participants, and open eyes for participating in projects with different or not obvious logical focus, but where the expertise is still being fully exploited. This can be the first step towards future co-operation in EU funded projects within the 7th Framework Programme of the EC.