BeSmart

On one side, each participating country is to provide technology providers (TP) that would bring their technology to SME for experimentation, integration and usage. These TP could be large telecom operators such as Orange in France or the equivalent in other countries, Nokia for 5G / nbiot / catM type of technologies, NXP for microchip and embedded electronics usage, and FI-ware as well to bring in API that can be used, tested and integrated into solutions during experimentations.

These TPs would be full partners and be funded for their work, support and expertise in bringing their technologies to SMEs. We expect to have 1 or 2 TP per country.

On the other side, each participating country is to also provide availability to users, test zones, experimental zones (EZ), etc. For these EZs, we are looking for large players or sponsors (SP) that have an interest in bringing in connected devices and the internet of things (IOT) into their zone for experimentation.

These zones can be maritime ports, agrifood factorys, automobile factories, or any type of industrial site that is open to having experimentations on their zone. They need to be open to having the TPs above work with SMEs to solve their usage problems. The usage problems (UP) ideally need to be defined in the project proposal phase before closure on april 2, but if the SP agree in principal to join the consortium and have a high level idea of the issues or UP they would like to address in EZ, this is sufficient for inclusion in the proposition as we don’t intend to provide funding to the SPs.

With the above TP and SP and their usage problems, we would then carry out open calls to bring in European SME to work with the TP technologies on solving the Sponsors user problems by experimenting in their experimental zones. We expect to carry out one open call per year and to distribute at least 50% of the project budget to SMEs in this way.

Links to the I4MS project are welcome as indicated in the call.