Objectives
* Explore concrete collaboration opportunities between different type of EU businesses, particularly tech-savvy SMEs and traditional SMEs. These collaborations should improve industrial competences, increase resilience and add value to existing industrial sectors and value chains
* Increase the adoption of advanced technologies in traditional SMEs and help EU tech-savvy SMEs that developed critical technology applications to expand their market potential in the EU
* Exploit the strong potential of dynamic collaboration between the cluster organisations and their technology centres with a view to boosting the technological uptake and development of EU SMEs
* Develop businesses collaboration between different clusters from the same industrial ecosystem and create partnerships with other relevant industrial ecosystems

Priorities
Priority 1: Intelligence gathering for more in-depth strategic identification of the needs of SMEs that could potentially participate in the project
Priority 2: Partnership building
Priority 3: Identification of the potential group of businesses targeted to participate in the project and justification of them being the best candidates.

Among financed actions
– Build strategic alliances between traditional SMEs
– Support the established strategic alliances in bridging with EU tech-savvy SMEs
– Organise and manage at least one virtual match-making event following and complementing each hackathon
– Organise technical assistance, provided by technology centres, for the uptake of the selected technologies by the traditional SMEs benefiting from the project
– Provide business support for the adaptation of the technologies to the SMEs in their cluster; provide support on access to public and private funding for the adoption of these technologies
– dentify opportunities and threats SMEs face while they intend to adopt advanced technologies and provide appropriate industrial policy recommendations for specific ecosystems and per each advanced technology
– Organise the necessary communication and dissemination activities to first mobilise EU traditional and tech-savvy SMEs, and then share best practices with other cluster organisations and technology centres

Additional information
* This call for proposals is a restricted call for proposals. 

* Initial duration of the action: 24 months

* Eligibility:
– Be a legal entity  
– Be representatives of industry, research community, and technology providers:
        – Cluster organisations
        – Technology centres
        – SMEs

* Amount of the grant: between 2 million and 3 million euro
* Co-financing rate:  90% of the total eligible costs