R&I Preparation for the Market

The challenges and recommendations towards a secure and trusted Digital Single Market were discussed on the World Café Sessions held during the second Cyber Concertation meeting of H2020 projects from unit H1 "Cybersecurity & Privacy” last June 2019. One of the topics being discussed was “How R&I can improve the way they prepare for the market”.

A great deal of effort of EU-funded projects goes into developing the technological aspects of products and project outputs. However, a corresponding amount of support activity is vital to bring those outputs to the market, providing an organic sustainability plan and an exploitation strategy.

The Cyberwatching.eu project is addressing this issue in a number of ways through:

1. The project’s European Project Radar, which maps and positions over 200 EC-funded projects within the Cybersecurity landscape;
2. The market and technology readiness level analysis (MTRL) of projects, which are used to understand and assess how close the research and innovation (R&I) projects are to the market; and
3. The project cybersecurity and privacy marketplace provides a platform for projects to showcase their results to a market audience and rub shoulders with start-ups and SMEs innovating in the area.

Within the context of sustainability and exploitation, ‘Market Readiness’ is defined as the process by which a consortium ensures that their project outputs are ready to go to the market. The cyberwatching.eu consortium organised two (2) webinars in the first quarter of 2020 to address the issues. Several R&I projects collaborated and participated in addressing the challenges and opportunities in the "R&I Preparation for the Market":

• "From research to market: promising outputs are not enough!"  with the participation of three R&I projects, GHOST, PROTECTIVE, SMESEC, and CDTI (a Spanish National Contact Point for EIC Accelerator)
• "A visual guide to the EU Cybersecurity project landscape" with Oxford University and AEI Ciberseguridad (two of the Cyberwatching.eu partners), and ECHO project.

This report is a follow-up of the previous webinars including concrete recommendations coming from the R&I projects (GHOST, PROTECTIVE and SMESEC), the national contact point and Cyberwatching team, on how R&I can improve the way they prepare for the market and how they can take advantage of free resources such as the Radar and the MTRL analysis as describied in D2.3 Methodology for the classification of projects and market readiness.

Download a copy now!