The ICT for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) reaches its third phase investing €33 million to boost competiveness of manufacturing SMEs

BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Created by the European Commission in 2013 in order to boost SMEs competitiveness in the digital era, ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) begins its third phase to promote the digital innovation of manufacturing SMEs in Europe.

The aim of the I4MS is to ensure that SMEs in Europe can fully benefit from digital innovations to upgrade its products, improve its processes and adapt its business models to the digital ages challenges.

The third phase will have a global budget of €33 million, which will be added to the nearly €110 million that have been already invested since 2013, to offer technological and financial support to SMEs to experiment with different ICT enabling technologies and digitised Industry 4.0 processes. The funding will allow SMEs and Technology Providers to run small scale experiments to test digital innovations, creating a win-win situation for different actors.

I4MS has funded four new projects that are focused in four technology areas: HPC cloud-based simulation (www.cloudifacturing.eu), robotics (www.l4ms.eu), additive manufacturing (www.amable.eu) and cyber physical systems and Internet of things (www.midih.eu). The projects will launch 9 open calls for experiments across 2018 and 2020.

The I4MS experiments extend recent advances of ICT beyond the traditional European manufacturing sectors to other industrial sectors in which efficient use of advanced ICT would enable SMEs to play a stronger role.

The third phase of I4MS will have an online community to foster the collaboration for digital transformation, the Disruptors awards, that will select the best ICT technologies experiments, and the Skills Observatory, which provides an overview of all digital skills and training materials focused on robotics, HPC, IoT, additive manufacturing and CPS.

I4MS also features significant industry events like the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona the last week of February. I4MS presence was focused on different industry-driven activities created to communicate the opportunities of I4MS to the Mobile World Congress audience.

I4MS is coordinated by Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation, FundingBox Accelerator, Foreningen MADE, FIWARE Foundation EV and Axencia Galega de Innovación.