MERLIN aims to support ICT researchers, SMEs and startups across to realise the full potential and impact of their research and development outputs by crafting them into innovations and achieving market validation using modern needs-first, market-led methodologies like Business Model Canvas, Customer Discovery, Lean Hardware, etc. The project will provide training, networking and follow-on support through 43 practical workshops, 4 webinars (on SME growth and PPP business models), 5 international conference workshops and 8 meetups with potential customers and commercial partners. MERLIN will have over 1250 attendees at in-person workshops and meetups across the four principal nodes of Madrid (ES), Vilnius (LT), Poznań (PL) and Cambridge (UK) and the secondary nodes of Berlin (DE), Warsaw (PL), Tallinn (EE), Bucharest (RO), international webinars and international ICT conferences in Europe. For sustainability, and to increase the participants’ success in bringing to market their innovation, MERLIN will integrate participants with existing national (e.g. Innovate UK, Enterprise Ireland, CDTI) and European initiatives (Startup Europe, ERDF, EFSI, etc.) designed to support early entrepreneurship, product development, market access, seed financing and microfinancing for continued support on their journey to market validation and company growth. The project will also identify and promote high-potential innovators through attendance at Startup Europe events to access other European startup ecosystems, entrepreneurs, investors and accelerators. These activities will see over 160 new business model canvases developed, 1040 individual 1-on-1s with potential commercial customers, serial entrepreneurs and business angels, 250 applications to regional, national and international support actions and the creation of 30 new ventures in the lifetime of the project with an anticipated further 60-100 in the following 3 years’ post project, creating over 1200 jobs in the medium-term.

CREATE-IoT’s aim is to stimulate collaboration between IoT initiatives, foster the take up of IoT in Europe and support the development and growth of IoT ecosystems based on open technologies and platforms. This requires synchronisation and alignment on strategic and operational terms through frequent, multi-directional exchanges between the various activities under the IoT Focus Areas (FAs). It also requires cross fertilisation of the various IoT Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) for technological and validation issues of common interest across the various application domains and use cases. CREATE-IoT will align the activities with the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) and will coordinate and support the upcoming LSPs in sustaining the ecosystems developed during those projects through mapping the pilot architecture approaches, address interoperability and standards approaches at technical and semantic levels for object connectivity, protocols, data formats, privacy, security, trusted IoT, open APIs and share the road-mapping with international initiatives. The project will foster the exchange on requirements for legal accompanying measures, development of common methodologies and KPI for design, testing and validation and for success and impact measurement, federation of pilot activities and transfer to other pilot areas, facilitating the access for IoT entrepreneurs/API developers/makers, SMEs, including combination of ICT & Art. CREATE-IoT will build strong connections with Member States' initiatives and other initiatives and will transfer learning points to the broader IoT policy framework that include contractual PPPs (e.g. Big Data, Factories of the Future, 5G-infrastructure), Joint Technology Initiatives (e.g. ECSEL), European Innovation Partnerships (e.g. on Smart Cities) as well as other FAs (e.g. on Autonomous transport). It will also maintain a coordinated working relationship with the parallel CSA that is centere on RRI-SSH.

The aim of the innovation action STARTUP SCALEUP is to build a European ecosystem around four consolidated entrepreneurial ecosystems in Spain (Cloud Incubator HUB), the Netherlands (Crosspring Lab), Lithuania (Open Coffee Club) and Ireland (The Ryan Academy) and the largest social network for startups in the European Union (F6S), in order to provide a greater range and quality of services to ambitious entrepreneurs who want to launch and grow companies focused on the Internet of Things and Services (IoTS). These four ecosystems, who have a track record and complementary strengths, will be able to support startups by enhancing the basic business skills of the entrepreneurs to strengthen the business sense of their startups,testing the soundness of technological concept and its uniqueness in the market, providing early exposure to EU market access, enabling talent matching and providing Venture Capital groups and other financiers with access to a critical mass of startups. To achieve this aim under the call topic (ICT-13-2014, web entrepreneurship), the STARTUP SCALEUP will: • Analyse which of their current services are best-in-class, assess which of these can be offered on a non-local scale and then design and implement a new service model to their entrepreneurs. • Set up an online platform for mentoring, networking and training through which the ecosystem members can share knowledge, experience, and contacts to support the startups, transcending geographical, cultural and resouce-related barriers. • Generate awareness and interest in STARTUP SCALEUP by developing a specific communication strategy that enables us to to attract the most talented startups to the ecosystem, pull in resources and publicize the activities of the ecosystem • Run two sequential acceleration programmes in order to create IoTS-based companies and the validate and readjust the STARTUP SCALEUP ecosystem and services. • Set up a dissemination plan to maximize the expected project impact.