Business opportunities and partnerships

In this task, the local businesses and solution providers (including start-ups) in the partner cities are brought together with the European industry partners through a carefully formulated collaboration framework (D3.2). As a first step, a call for local innovators will be launched. Local businesses are encouraged to share knowledge and information, and to develop complementing solutions to the mainstream options already developed by the EU industry partners and catalogued in Task 3.1. Through these complementary solutions, the mainstream options are adapted to the partner city needs. Through a joint effort between the partner cities, local and European industry, business models and plans are developed. Business plans (Task 3.3) will lay out concrete steps to seize business opportunities that have been identified. Therefore, this task will also identify local businesses and specific envisioned services and products relevant for the demonstration actions. This will outline for each start-up the related program elements in the demo activity. It also states their planned deliverables and contributions. In order to enhance the cooperation beyond the consortium, a network will be created with SMEs active in e-mobility in Europe and the partner regions. Through the online catalogue (from Task 3.1) and network-events the potential demand for e-mobility options will be shared with SMEs. Moreover, workshops with SMEs will be organised around convincing concrete business development leads. For many of the fast-growing SMEs it may be difficult to select the right opportunity for cooperation, Hence, the focus lays on robust business development opportunities that match the current needs and potential of local partners. It is foreseen that these network events and workshops result in participation of European SMEs in the demonstration projects, and lead to spin-off partnerships with local companies. SOLUTIONSplus will conduct targeted match-making efforts and project initiations.