The Euroclusters partnerships are intended to launch a new network of cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary and trans-European strategic initiatives aimed at strengthening Europe’s resilience by connecting actors across countries, sectors and industrial ecosystems. To this end, they will be running calls to provide financial support to SMEs. The ECCP team spoke to Yuan Chai, of the B-resilient - Building the biomass resilience of food producing and processing SMEs through green and digitalised value chains Euroclusters project about their open call, goals, intentions and the opportunities they are presenting to the European cluster community.

Yuan described the project's ambition as “to help agri-food SMEs [towards] an optimal use of biomass and ensure the green and digital twin transition”. The project will focus on maximising usage of available feedstock and its subsequent valorisation of side streams into innovative bio-based ingredients. Under the ‘agri-food’ strand, the project is built on a zero-waste, circular concept, improving the competitiveness of food processing SMEs from an environmentally sustainable perspective. Led by Wagralim (BE), the consortium is composed of 8 partners, who have a wide collaboration history and are all part of the S3 I4CE partnership.

There are 4 types of lump sum support organised under 2 calls:

• A Mobility call: “Get inspired at the European Food biomass & bioeconomy summit and get access to the Pan-EU networking opportunity”.
• An Acceleration call: “A concrete help to the company from R&D to market implementation with lump sum support”.

The calls will be organised as follows: