Challenges and opportunities for SMEs and start-ups in EU security R&I

Under the frame of the Community of European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS), DG HOME is organising a new set of conferences addressing matters that are cross-cutting to the R&I activity in the different security domains. This set of conferences under the Thematic Group “Strengthened Security Research and Innovation”, look with particular interest into the challenges of innovation uptake.

Improving the uptake of successful security R&I outcomes is crucial for the EU-funded R&I programme. Equally crucial is favouring the uptake of security solutions developed by start-ups and innovative SMEs.

Europe’s 25 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the EU economy. Among these, high-tech start-ups and innovative SMEs, can contribute to societal challenges, such as civil security, by underpinning the transformational capacity of technologies and helping spread innovation throughout European regions.

However, small firms face important issues that range from access to finance to finding customers. A number of obstacles hinder the accessibility of small industrial players to public markets, and even more significantly when these markets impose restrictions due to national security considerations. What opportunities brought by the Security part of the EU-funded R&I framework programme can help start-ups and innovative SMEs paving their way to the EU security market?

The scope of this webinar was to:

• Give visibility to the challenges faced by SMEs when trying to bring outcomes of R&I to the security market, but also to possible ways to address them;
• Explore options to bring the SMEs closer to the public security buyers, and vice-versa;
• Identify opportunities for SMEs to increase the impact of their participation in EU-funded security R&I projects;
• Propose actions and recommendations to boost the uptake of innovation stemming from EU start-ups and innovative SMEs