Proposals should address the involvement of SMEs and/or start-ups with significant potential to foster innovation through their engagement with large scale pilots. Focus will be on leveraging and nurturing emerging collaborations between stakeholder communities shaping an effective eco-system fit for the challenge of European AI, Data, Robotics, and on accelerating European R&I through structural involvement of innovative SME and deep-tech start-ups.

Proposals should target sectors and application domains with wide-scale deployment potential and maximum contribution to the green deal.

Multidisciplinary innovation activities should address one of the following: Large scale pilots bringing major industries from key application sectors in Europe – facilitating collaboration between small and large companies with the goal of exploiting and integrating existing tools, sub-systems and solutions that are re-usable from other sectors (thereby showing scalability/versatility, and enabling economies of scale) to have significant impact on the objectives of the green deal.
The focus will be on the integration of tools, systems sub-systems and solution in the pilot by the grant beneficiaries.
In this case, proposals are not expected to involve the use of financial support to third parties.

The development of large-scale pilots addressing key applications with a significant and scalable impact on the objectives of the green deal by facilitating collaboration between small and large companies able address key challenges in the deployment of AI, Data and Robotics.

Financial Support to Third Parties: Projects should use FSTP to leverage novel technical advantage to address the operation of the pilot and to thereby support end users and service providers in addressing the challenges of the green deal. Third parties are expected to use the pilots for developing, testing and validating innovative solutions with significant impact on the green deal. Proposals should clearly delineate the expected contributions from the main beneficiaries as well as from the third parties, to ensure their coherence and impact. 40% of the EU funding requested by the proposal should be allocated to the purpose of financial support to third parties.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on AI, data and robotics.