The CELTIC-NEXT Spring Call is open for project proposals in the area of telecommunications and ICT. The deadline for proposal submissions is 14 April 2022.
Further information is available on the CELTIC-NEXT Call Page.
The Eureka Clusters AI Call 2021 was launched on 1st March 2021 with a submission deadline of 28th June 2021. The aim of this Call is to boost the productivity and competitiveness of European industries through the adoption and use of AI systems and services.
The Call is based on the interest shown in the first Eureka Clusters AI Call in 2020 and the national priorities in the Eureka Member states. These priorities include supporting the development, adaption and utilisation of emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities across multiple vertical and technological domains.
This second Call for innovative projects in the AI domain was launched by the Eureka Clusters CELTIC-NEXT, EURIPIDES²-PENTA, EUROGIA, ITEA3, and SMART, together with 14 Public Authorities of Eureka member states. Eurescom has contributed to the Call via the CELTIC Office and by hosting the Call website.
Further information on the Call is available on the Eureka Clusters AI Call 2021 website.
On 1st July, Portugal took over the Eureka chairmanship for one year – already for the third time in the 35-year history of Eureka. The motto of the Portuguese Chairmanship is “Innovation for a greener, digital and healthier planet through a collaborative approach”. CELTIC News editor Milon Gupta asked Eureka chairman Miguel Bello Mora, CEO of the Atlantic International Research Centre in Portugal, about priorities and progress of Eureka after the first quarter of the Portuguese Eureka term.
Miguel Bello Mora: We have five main priorities for the Portuguese Eureka chairmanship:
First, to increase the global outreach of the Eureka Network by promoting collaboration with international organizations with an important innovation component, like the European Space Agency, and via the organization of a series of international events.
Second, to enhance new forms of cooperation for effective RDI programmes by strengthening the relation with the European Union within the new Horizon Europe framework programme for research, development, and innovation.
Third, strengthening the Eureka Network’s positioning by reinforcing the mechanisms for the generation of projects, contributing to the revitalization of the Eureka Clusters Programme.
Fourth, adding value to the Eureka label, with the organisation of Eureka’s Global Innovation Summit 2022 and the Eureka Ministerial Meeting in Portugal in June 2022.
And fifth, to continue the necessary restructuring of the Eureka Secretariat and pursue a healthy financial model for the Eureka Secretariat.
Miguel Bello Mora: The Portuguese chairmanship is contributing to the revitalization of the Eureka Clusters Programme by implementing the new governance model, ensuring greater compromise from public authorities on the funding of projects, intensifying the participation of industrial key players at the board of Clusters’ governance structures and promoting collaboration and cross-fertilisation between Clusters through the organisation of joint calls.
A joint thematic call is promoted with a topic focused on Space-Ocean-Earth Observation Systems and Space related technologies which would include the promotion of projects linked with the Green Deal in areas like Earth Observation from Space and its combination with Artificial Intelligence.
Miguel Bello Mora: During the first months of the Eureka Portuguese chairmanship some of the strategic priorities have been implemented, like the collaboration with the European Space Agency, where a Memorandum of Understanding is in preparation, and the first of the international events on “Eureka meets the Atlantic through Space-Ocean-Earth collaborative innovations”. In addition, the final proposal for the Eurostars 3 programme, one of the flagship projects of Eureka, has been completed in August.
Miguel Bello Mora: Our vision beyond the Portuguese Chairmanship is to have Eureka as a major tool to promote research and innovation, strengthening the bottom-up, open and flexible nature of the network by building on the work done by the previous Chairmanships while following the strategic priorities of the recently approved Eureka Strategic Roadmap for 2021-2027.
Eureka shall promote the dynamism of the economy and European innovation through the recovery period from the crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and should stimulate new opportunities for the development of new products and services in global markets, as well as new international collaborations towards citizens wellbeing and healthy living.
Rita Silva
ANI – Agência Nacional de Inovação, SA
ANI – Agência Nacional de Inovação, SA, is the National Innovation Agency of Portugal. It is owned in equal shares by IAPMEI – the Portuguese Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation under the Ministry of the Economy and Digital Transition – and FCT – the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. ANI supports technological and business innovation in Portugal, contributing to the consolidation of the national innovation system and to strengthening the competitiveness of the national economy in global markets.
In 2020, Portugal reached a 1,6% R&D share of national GDP, an all-time high. 57% of R&D funding comes from companies’ investments. There are around 4,300 R&D-performing companies investing an average of 420,000 euro per year to develop new technologies.
Along this path, an ambitious national strategy for technological and entrepreneurial innovation for the period 2018-2030 has been defined. It includes main targets such as achieving a global investment in R&D of 3% of GDP by 2030, with a relative share of two thirds coming from private expenditure, as well as becoming a European leader in digital skills by 2030. From 2021 to 2027, Portugal aims to double the Portuguese participation in European Union funding programmes, and to attract around 2 billion euros for R&I, as well as tripling the number of students in mobility in higher education, compared to 2014-2020.
ANI has a central role in the Portuguese innovation ecosystem and contributes to the achievement of the major national innovation goals. The Agency manages financial and fiscal incentives programmes to promote private investment in R&D and to foster collaborative R&D between companies and R&D institutions for an effective transfer of knowledge to the market. ANI also promotes the internationalisation of Portuguese innovative companies and R&D institutions through supporting their participation in the Horizon Europe R&DI Framework Programme as well as other international networks for R&D cooperation and business internationalisation such as the Enterprise Europe Network and the Eureka Network.
Portugal has now for the third time since becoming one of the 18 founding member states of the Eureka Network in 1985 taken over the Chairmanship of Eureka from July 2021 until June 2022. ANI is part of the Chairmanship Team, hosting the National Eureka office.
The EUREKA Clusters prove to be an excellent channel for the internationalisation of Portuguese companies, academia, RTOs and research centres enabling them to access to global value chains, to new knowledge and to partner with numerous countries. In fact, the opportunity offered by the Eureka Network and the Clusters projects to collaborate beyond Europe on a truly global stage is one of the major benefits identified by companies.
CELTIC-NEXT is the Eureka Cluster with
the largest Portuguese participation. This is related to the fact that the technological area with the largest Portuguese participation in EUREKA projects is electronics, IT and telecoms technology (62 %).
Between 2008-2020, 31 CELTIC projects with Portuguese participation were funded. Since 2017, with the introduction of a grant-based funding instrument relying on European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) to support Eureka and Eurostars projects, the funding of Eureka Clusters projects has become more agile and stable in Portugal. This has raised interest and created renewed dynamics among stakeholders to apply and participate.
Under the new instrument “Projetos de I&D Industrial à Escala Europeia”, 11 new CELTIC projects were recently funded, reflecting a total investment from the Portuguese entities involved of 7 million euro and corresponding to approximately 4.5 million euro of public funding.
The Portuguese entities most represented in CELTIC-NEXT projects include companies such as UBIWHERE Lda, CELFINET – CONSULTORIA EM TELECOMUNICAÇÕES, S.A., Proef Eurico Ferreira S.A., GLINTT Healthcare Solutions S.A., Wavecom – Soluções Radio S.A., and renowned research centres like Instituto de Telecomunicações, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), or Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco.
CELTIC-NEXT projects with Portuguese participation focus on several ICT areas such as energy efficiency and quality of service/experience in mobile telecommunications networks, smart operations optimization and performance monitoring in mobile telecommunications networks, healthcare, smart cities, and internet of the future. Their main partner countries are Spain, France, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Canada, Korea, and Israel.
As an added-value of participating in
CELTIC-NEXT projects, Portuguese entities report an overall increase in competitiveness levels through the possibility to access new markets, to improve their positioning in global value chains, an increase in exports, improvement in R&DI capacities and gain of new expertise through the possibility to employ highly qualified human resources and lastly, the enlargement of the company’s product portfolio and cross-selling of solutions.
ANI headquarters in Porto
› Further information
ANI website – https://www.ani.pt/en
Xavier Priem
Director CELTIC Office
For CELTIC-NEXT, 2021 was a year of renewal and change. 2022 and 2023 were two important years of implementation and analysis. Let’s have a look together to what has been achieved to date, and what we plan for 2024 & 2025.
Since 2022, we have pursued the implementation of CELTIC’s new roadmap by running several actions. We incorporated this roadmap in our Launch Events and Proposers’ Brokerage Days, to allow consortia to propose innovative projects in the large number of fields of technologies, applications, and verticals of the new roadmap. This is our traditional bottom-up approach. We will continue to run our Spring and Autumn Calls as per our successful legacy. This is a unique selling point of CELTIC as a Eureka Cluster compared to other international funding schemes. And it will remain so in the future.
We signed two major partnerships (with ESA and with 6G-IA-SNS) to enhance our funding impact in the global ICT community, as well as in other industries. Those partnerships will nourish further our roadmap and attractiveness to Public Authorities to fund impactful innovative projects across and beyond the Eureka and European (contracted form: Eurekan) countries. The targets of those partnerships are: knowledge exchange & SRIAs cross-contributions; leveraging funding schemes across Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) & topics; calls timing alignment & Easier pipelining of proposals; from Research to Market (TRL 7, early adopters, testbeds…); offering innovative entities the full panel between top-down programs and bottom-up spaces for their collaborative projects.
CELTIC-NEXT director Xavier Priem presented the CELTIC-NEXT Eureka CLUSTER
advantages and proposal support at the 5G Techritory in a 6G-SNS ICE co-creation workshop on National initiatives.
At the time of publication of this edition of the CELTIC-NEXT’s News, the Spring Call 2024 will have ended. Therefore, it is already time to announce the Autumn Call 2024! The Autumn Call 2024 will be launched on the 28th of May 2024 with an online event. The Proposers’ Brokerage Day will take place on the 5th of September 2024 in physical presence. The location will be announced via our Newsletter and our Web site. The submission will close on the 21st of October 2024, for a labelling early December 2024. Forecasted possible start dates for labelled projects would be first half of 2025. We can also happily say that more countries support CELTIC-NEXT and that Sweden supports again our Autumn Calls.
AINET is ending, time has come for a new flagship
AINET Flagship and its three vertical projects have been tremendous successes with a high impact on several fundamental KPIs. Those projects are about to end. A final Closure Event is programmed for the 2nd of July 2024, collocated with the 6G Conference Berlin. Please check the Events section of this CELTIC-NEXT News issue.
As we are writing those lines, a new large consortium has formed and is making the proposal of a new flagship proposal in the stream of SASER, SENDATE and AINET. More information will be shared if this proposal gets labelled during this summer. The CELTIC-NEXT office is happy to establish the contact between potential new partners interested in joining the flagship after its labelling. Please contact us at .
Designing the Space ICT flagship programme
Space ICT has become a subject of high attention for industry and governments, and this has been strongly reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. A clear sign has been also sent by 3GPP, which has now opened wider doors for the inclusion of SatCom besides the traditional backhauling role. The Memorandum of Intent will encourage terrestrial ICT and Space ICT industry collaboration with other industry verticals to facilitate the adoption of advanced Space ICT technologies in the business models and processes of all industry sectors. CELTIC-NEXT and ESA are working together to define a joint roadmap of technologies, use cases and agenda of calls. ESA is a key actor in the development of all aspects and fields of space activity. Once the first roadmap and calls agenda are ready, CELTIC and ESA will advertise those. The joint Roadmap and Agenda are being defined. The first CELTIC Space ICT flagship is under discussion with the Industry and the funding agencies and ministries.
The CELTIC-NEXT’s Director has the mandate from CELTIC-NEXT’s Core Group to propose and integrate new industry members to the existing Core Group. Some discussions are ongoing for some industrial companies.
An analysis of the first results for the in 2021 initiated Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP) is currently ongoing. Target is to understand if the new structured collaborative approach grouping the five Eureka clusters under a Eureka Programme as such has achieved the goals it was assigned. Same applies to the first Joint Thematic Call on Sustainability. More will be reported once this analysis is finished.
No new Join Thematic Call bringing all Clusters together in a same call is foreseen as of today. Potential new more focused Joint Calls with CELTIC-NEXT, where a sub-group of clusters (2 to 3) would engage together, are under discussion. Once those calls are exhaustively defined, the CELTIC-NEXT office will advert them. Stay tuned by visiting ou Call Calendar page: https://www.celticnext.eu/call-calendar/ and/or by subscribing to our Newsletter under https://www.celticnext.eu/news-subscription/ .
2024 is and will remain a challenging year for many topics. Joint collaborative innovation and knowledge exchange is one of the best weapons against obscurantism, pandemics and wars. Our ICT community is one of the best positioned to understand and support this. Cybersecurity, Resilience of Critical Infrastructures, Sustainability… are certainly topics to be fully supported by our ICT technologies and to be ranked now as absolute priorities in the new world that is in front of us. The new flagship proposal goes along those strategic lines.
2024 is also a year of joyful proud Celebration! CELTIC is getting 21 years old! This special Anniversary will be celebrated in Berlin on the 2nd of July 2024, during the 6G Berlin Conference, under the new presidency of Eureka by Germany and Canada. High Level Representatives from our Industry and from Ministries and Eureka’s new President will take the floor to share their support and enthusiasm about CELTIC across its history and for the coming years!
A detailed agenda will be shared soon. Stay tuned by visiting ou Call Calendar page: https://www.celticnext.eu/call-calendar/ and/or by subscribing to our Newsletter under https://www.celticnext.eu/news-subscription/.
Xavier Priem
Director CELTIC Office
CELTIC-NEXT has been through several changes this year: a new Director, updated vision, mission and roadmap, and last but not least, the active role in the new Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP). Our Spring Call has been very successful, with six projects labelled and now in the funding phase, and we are curious to see the proposals from our Autumn Call, which closed on 22nd November. We are very active in preparing the future with a new Flagship series programme and closing partnerships with other funding bodies.
When I became the new CELTIC Director at the end of March this year, I discovered, from the inside, CELTIC’s strong DNA, built over its 18 years of successful fostering of the ICT RDI community across Eureka countries. It has been around nine months since then – one could say, the time of a pregnancy. It has been an interesting experience, because, in a way, we have further enriched CELTIC’s DNA over the last months in various manners.
First, we did this by following the long-established tradition of labelling new projects from the last bottom-up Spring Call; here I personally wish to all projects to be successful in being awarded with their national fundings.
Secondly, we did this via the joint work and exchanges we had with our other Eureka Clusters friends in the context of the ECP Multi-Annual-Plan preparation and successful approval, on 17th June 2021, by Eureka and its funding Public Authorities. We will use the opportunity of the ECP MAP to address wider industrial communities and bring in additional funding countries to our ICT community. The ECP MAP application gave us also the additional opportunity to revisit the vision, mission and roadmap, last elaborated in 2018, in the light of the latest challenges and opportunities that both our ICT community and the wider world have been facing since then, like COVID-19, supply-chain challenges and the new potential role of satellites and alike in 5G, 6G and overall services.
Finally, and very much linked to the last point, CELTIC will cross its DNA with other communities in the near future, starting with the European Space sector.
This new enriched DNA will be the base for future flagship calls and projects, coming in addition to the successful series of CELTIC flagship projects like SASER, SENDATE and currently AI-NET.
After an intensive preparation and application period, which culminated in the ECP authorisation to operate as Clusters, the five Eureka Clusters CELTIC-NEXT, EUROGIA2020, ITEA4,
SMART and XECS are now implementing the first Multi-Annual-Plan (MAP) as well as the first Annual Operational Plan (AOP). CELTIC-NEXT is, as in the preparation phase, very active in the implementation phase, in order to best represent our ICT community’s interests in the joint committees and actions. This period is crucial for CELTIC-NEXT to get the maximum return on investment from the new Eureka Clusters Programme, by getting the best representation in those additional funded calls. Therefore, I want to use this occasion to encourage readers from the RDI community to feed us with your needs, wishes and ideas on topics (technologies, use cases, and more) for the elaboration of future joint thematic call topics. The first thematic call will be about “Sustainable Industry” and will, among others, look at Green ICT as well as Space-Earth-Ocean Integrated Systems.
As the new Director, I am proud and honoured to drive this transformation and the development of CELTIC on behalf of CELTIC’s Management Group and Core Group members. Our new strategy gets already positive responses from the funding authorities of numerous Eureka countries, who want to invest in our new vision, mission and roadmap as presented in our application to ECP MAP. Our future flagship series programme is also getting very good traction, encouraging us to further pursue this new path. 2022 will be an interesting year for CELTIC!
CELTIC-NEXT is an industry-driven European research initiative to define, perform and finance through public and private funding common research projects. As the follow-on programme to the successful Eureka ICT cluster Celtic-Plus and its predecessor “Celtic-Initiative”, the cluster has been defined for 8 years until the end of 2026. CELTIC is supported by nearly all major European players in telecommunications. Bringing the major European telecommunications vendors and operators together into an ambitious European intergovernmental R&D programme, CELTIC is the best option to address a “system view” of communications to complement other existing Clusters.
CELTIC has been key for initiating ambitious and innovative projects dedicated to end-to-end communications solutions. Until today, CELTIC has labelled, funded and performed 176 projects in all their research areas with a total volume of more than one Billion Euro. By facilitating these collaborative R&D projects, CELTIC has made a great contribution to help Europe to stay at the competitive edge of the telecommunications industry.
Through 21 years of successfully running, the office has gathered the best tips and 5 key steps to submit a high-quality proposal and a rewarding project.
Step 1 – Use the brokerage tool
In order to support you in preparing your project proposal for CELTIC-NEXT Calls, we have created an online Brokerage Tool. Its goal is to help you build your Consortium in preparation for your CELTIC-NEXT Project. The tool functionalities are the following:
› Submission form for your Project Ideas and Expertise Offers
› Overview lists with search form
› Contact request forms
› Process owner support functions: approval process and contact request tracking
Step 2 – Attend to the call events
CELTIC-NEXT organises several events open to the public, which interested parties can attend to learn more about CELTIC-NEXT. We have typically one large CELTIC-NEXT Event per year, including an exhibition where running projects show their results. In addition, we are running several Launch Call Events and Proposers Days every year where interested parties can discuss their project ideas and potential project proposals with other interested experts and with representatives from the Public Authorities. Please watch out for upcoming CELTIC-NEXT Events.
Step 3 – Contact your public authorities
Projects can receive public funding, depending on the national funding rules. To speed up the funding decision process, each project participant should contact their national funding agency early in the process and follow their advice regarding national funding applications in parallel to the proposal submission. You may submit a short proposal abstract (including a short project outline, and intended consortium partners/countries) until one month before the deadline for a first check to the CELTIC Office.
Step 4 – Check your (funding) eligibility
Project proposals for CELTIC-NEXT Calls must meet specific criteria.The consortium should include at least two companies from different Eureka participating countries include at least one industrial partner from each of the countries and in a fair and well-balanced way. The project should generate an obvious advantage and added value resulting from the technological cooperation between the participants.
Step 5 – Submit your proposal in the CELTIC Proposal Submission Portal
First of all, you will need to create an account on the CELTIC Proposal Submission Portal https://cluster-projects.eurestools.eu/. Once your account is created, all steps and documents needed for upload will be explained.
5 factors for a successful project
› Targeting the research areas: Least but not last: CELTIC-NEXT focuses on telecommunication and ICT, connecting people and businesses securely and reliably. The topics in the picture are not prescriptive and are only meant to give you some idea of the wide scope. Any topic related to the CELTIC-NEXT vision of a Smart Connected World is eligible.
› Market relevance and exploitation potential: These are Key aspects to motivate Public Authorities to fund your project. The market analysis includes the technological value chain and added value of the collaboration, value chain as the right mix of partners in the consortium, added value of the cooperation at a technology level, added value by the cooperation at a business level, and consortium/partner access to the market.
› Technology innovation: Innovation above the State of the Art (SoA) is a Key Criterion; 50 % of criticism of the Cluster experts during proposal evaluation are related to insufficient description of the SoA. Strategic relevance and expected impact of your proposal on a per-country perspective such as what new businesses will be generated matters.
› Right mix of participating countries: A large majority of successful projects in the past have been funded and built by a minimum of three different countries. A total of 44 European and non-European countries worldwide are participating in CELTIC-NEXT, of which 27 are coming from Eureka countries.
› Knowing the process of the proposal submission: The CELTIC label decision is given in 3 stages: Proposal Submission by proposers, evaluation phase by Industry Experts and Public Authorities and lastly, Label Decision by the Public Authorities and CELTIC Core Group.
CELTIC-NEXT website – https://www.celticnext.eu/
