The ‘Factories of the Future’ PPP launched in 2008/9 has been a proven success and triggered a unique cooperation between industry, researchers and the European Institutions. The objective of the FoF Impact CSA is to transform the FoF PPP from a research and demonstration programme under FP7 into an innovation programme in Horizon 2020. The FoF-Impact CSA will integrate, in one comprehensive and service-oriented package, a set of tools and measures (guidelines, technology transfer tools and market uptake mechanisms) in support of exploitation of project results generated by the FoF PPP. The FoF-Impact CSA will build upon the existing work, such as the EFFRA Innovation Portal which offers a dynamic community-based environment for sharing and retrieving information about exploitable results. The FoF-Impact CSA will also facilitate collaboration among the main stakeholders which are capable of enhancing the overall impact of the ‘Factories of the Future’ PPP in Horizon 2020 at local and company-level. These actors are: manufacturing industries (large and SMEs), national and regional and other European manufacturing initiatives and programmes (Eureka, Manunet etc); technology transfer organisations and market-uptake experts; industry-focused RTOs and institutes, marketers of exploitable results, potential users of exploitable results, possible investors and business angels. In summary, the FoF Impact CSA will provide tailor-made guidelines and tools (including a FoF-Impact helpdesk) that will service both individual 'Factories of the Future' projects as well as clusters of 'Factories of the Future' projects. The clustering of projects results will be supported both by the existing EFFRA Innovation Portal and through the organisation of specific events, oriented either to technologies, application sectors or specific challenges, and it will thus further stimulate cross-fertilisation and the identification of additional exploitation opportunities.

KITT4SME specifically targets European SMEs and mid-caps to provide them with scope-tailored and industry-ready hardware, software and organisational kits, delivered as a modularly customisable digital platform, that seamlessly introduce artificial intelligence in their production systems. Uptake of the resulting packages and of the provided services is strongly supported by the clear characterisation and market readiness of the individual components as well as by the platform grounding on the already established RAMP marketplace. Leverage on the network of Digital Innovation Hubs, three of which are represented in the consortium, ensure that KITT4SME are widely distributed to a wide audience of companies in Europe. Seamless adoption of the customised kits is made possible by a Powered by FIWARE infrastructure that flawlessly combine factory systems (such as MES and ERP), IoT sensors and wearable devices, robots, collaborative robots and other factory data sources with functional modules capable to trigger data-driven value creation.

The introduction of the Innovation Radar is a great step forward for bringing investors and innovations together. However, it is not enough as there still exists a lack of understanding between the investors and the innovators. Based on the Innovation Radar report , there is a large gap where almost half of all innovations see access to finance as the main bottleneck for bringing their innovation to market. Currently, investors lack information on new innovations coming from the research initiatives and researchers lack experience and access when it comes to reaching out to investors and scaling up their businesses. The purpose of this CSA and the mission of INVEST is to overcome this lack of information and bridge the gap between research projects and investors from both sides; hereby significantly increasing the number of new ventures created from EU-funded innovations. To bring innovators and investors together and to reduce the information disparity, it is crucial to leverage the Innovation Radar data and enrich it with third party data so that innovations and investors become able to find each other and have ways to put this information into perspective when possible (i.e. benchmarking, pattern finding, comparing). To make this connection successfully, innovations need to be investor ready, which will be accomplished through our targeted venture building and tech due diligence activities. INVEST brings Europe's leading startup data platform together with venture builders and tech dd service providers to create the ideal matchmaking platform that can bring a step change in the number of new ventures created.

The ROSSINI project aims to develop a disruptive, inherently safe hardware-software platform for the design and deployment of human-robot collaboration (HRC) applications in manufacturing. By combining innovative sensing, actuation and control technologies (developed by world market leaders in their field), and integrating them in an open development environment, the ROSSINI platform will deliver a set of tools which will enable the spread of HRC applications where robots and human operators will become members of the same team, increasing job quality, production flexibility and productivity. Thanks to enhanced robot sensing capabilities, the deployment of artificial intelligence to optimise productivity and safety, and natively collaborative manipulation technologies, ROSSINI will deliver high performance HRC workcells, combining the safety of traditional cobots with the working speed and payloads of industrial robots. The ROSSINI research lines will this be: SENSING: A high performance Smart and Safe Sensor System for human and robot detection & tracking, capable of quickening sensors response time by 70% CONTROL: A safety aware control architecture for robot dynamic reconfiguration, capable of reducing robot task execution time by 45% ACTUATION: An innovative, collaborative by birth robot manipulator, to be marketed through the ROSSINI platform, capable of increasing the working speed when collaborating with humans by 45% HUMAN FACTORS: Human factors analysis for mutual predictability of robot and human intentions, capable of increasing job quality index by 15% RISK ASSESSMENT: A risk assessment procedure based on new interpretation of collision values, capable of reducing (combined with other results) by 30% the time and cost of reconfiguration, and increasing the allowed robot working speed by 20% The research lines will be combined into 3 demonstrators (white goods, electronic equipment, and food packaging).