Smart city landscape

Cities are increasingly becoming powerful engines of economic and sustainable growth, fuelled by an ever-increasing rate of specialized skills and intelligent community. ICTs can play a crucial role to make them more resilient, while also ensuring that governments, businesses, and citizens adapt to ensure that urban growth is done in a smart manner. Nevertheless, this urban and economic growth correlates with the significant sustainability challenges that our society faces at present. Here ICTs can contribute significantly by increasing environmental efficiency across industry sectors and enabling innovations that can support this objective.

Smart Partnership is an advisory firm created with the ultimate objective of becoming the Catalonian and European benchmark providing suport in the field of innovation, ecosystem creation and fundraising. Smat Partnership cultivates strategic relationships with innovative companies and governments at the local, regional, and national level in order to establish long-term partnerships.

Partner network
Excellence
Customer relationships

European entrepreneurship landscape

Despite the momentum that big businesses give to our economies, the more than 20 million SMEs in the EU represent 99% of businesses, and are a key driver for economic growth, innovation, employment and social integration. SMEs contribute more than half of the total value added in the non-financial business economy and provided 80% of all new jobs in Europe in the past five years

Challenges prevent greater progress

One of the main challenges faced by innovative SMEs lies in the access to risk finance to support the development of an innovative product, service or process. Unlike large companies, SMEs usually lack large reserves of capital to fund innovative projects by themselves, which makes them seek external funding opportunities.

Support through EU grants

One of the key strategic priorities set out in Europe 2020 is to promote successful entrepreneurship and improve the business environment for SMEs, to allow them to realise their full potential in today’s global economy and secure Europe’s global competitiveness. To achieve this, the European Commission created the flagship initiative Horizon 2020 as the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020).

Motivations

Although promoting an innovation-driven entrepreneurship in Europe is on the top list of the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan, the entrepreneurs and SMEs that can offer innovative technology solutions often do not have the resources to properly develop their projects and are often unaware of the existing financing instruments.

Objectives

The two primary objectives of Smart Partnership are to promote and create innovative quality proposals for cities in the fields of ICT, Energy, Sustainable Transport, Environment, and Social Challenges following the Europe 2020 objectives set by the European Commission, and to boost the competitiveness of European SMEs through innovation.

Action Plan

The core of our action plan is to provide SMEs with the necessary tools to get the financing they need to suport their activities, while defining a set of strategies for cities to become more intelligent through planning and execution of projects in the hands of new technologies with the aim of improving the quality of life citizens, and the development of municipalities under a sustainable culture.

Services

We help our customers write the proposal in the way that it would meet the programme requirements and the criteria that an European Commission evaluator typically looks for during the review, therefore creating a proposal with high chances of winning.

Find Your Funding Opportunities in Horizon 2020

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CloudOpting

CloudOpting (2014-2017) received funding from the European Union ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

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