This project was funded by the European Union’s COSME Programme under agreement No 951197.
The mission is to bring small medium enterprises offering niche technologies for value chains into new international markets.
GEN.ERA consortium enrolls Biotech clusters from five European countries. The project will address primarily small and medium sized enterprises operating within the clusters, to open opportunities by accessing global markets. For small medium enterprises offering niche technologies for specific industrial sectors or value chains, internationalization is the most efficient strategy to achieve high growth.
Our proposal therefore aims to stimulate the ecosystem as a whole, and will impact positively partners that can be integrated in our value chain such as academic, investors, industrial and health stakeholders.
SMEs beneficiaries of GEN.ERA:
SMEs which are already members of the clusters will benefit from specialized support services to facilitate access to foreign markets: Training program through webinars about targeted countries, prior access to relevant business information gained during the market analysis, networking with foreign potential partners during partnering days.
Our members will also be the first recipients in our approach to structure the partnership, sharing experiences among project partners will enable cross-fertilization. These services will enable SMEs to identify partners from the other clusters involved in the partnership to offer vast opportunities for co-creation and innovative products and services in the aim to formalize a new value-chain with an inclusive approach: contributing in workshops, benefiting from B2B matchmaking between members, and assisting to seminar on sectoral opportunities and latest innovation.
Activities will be extended to non-member SMEs as part of our international preparation for soft-landing. We wish to confederate around the partnership all the actors of the genomic/genomic field by making them benefit from our activities: webinar training, the partnering event gathering the largest number of actors of the sector.
It is important to create an environment where SMEs benefit from the experience of larger firms’ success in international markets. Our partnership contains a significant number of major companies that fit perfectly into our value chain. They will benefit from the activities described in the work plan in the same way as SMEs, while contributing with their experience.
Gene ecosystem beneficiaries:
Research institutions: The innovative nature of our field requires maintaining a close collaboration with the scientific communities and fostering the exchange of knowledge and ideas, creating favorable business environments and innovation ecosystems. Our respective clusters combine research and business entities, with technological cooperation between firms and research institutions. Research organization shall benefit from the network we aim to build, our companies largely focusing on ecosystem medical products R&D of the targeted regions. Then, we will disseminate relevant results of our market analysis to research centers related to this theme, thus, the seminars will be open to researchers.
Investors: Fundraising is a crucial step in accelerating a company’s growth, to make it possible a relationship of confidence must emerge between the funder and the entrepreneur. GEN.ERA aim to ensure the credibility of our SMEs by establishing a collective well identified trademark. Following the development of a coherent and complete value chain between our companies and the detection/analysis of opportunities in targeted markets, attractiveness of our companies will increase drastically and make them more appealing for potential investors. We want to give the possibility to initiate business talk at dedicated events such as seminars which includes matchmakings between investors and SMEs.
Industry: The production of future innovative biological therapies is an industrial challenge. In a context of production erosion in European pharmaceutical industry, we need to accelerate our production capacities for innovative therapies, in line with the objectives of Horizon 2020 INNOSUP-1 action for “Cluster facilitated projects for new industrial value chains”.
The growth through internationalization of SMEs, positioned at the forefront of biotech innovation, makes it possible to achieve the development of the industrial bioproduction of the future through the development of breakthrough technologies.
GEN.ERA partnership wants to foster industries and SMEs cooperation, we plan to open matchmaking events to industrials and promote during the entire preparation phase the importance of industrial collaboration.
Indirect beneficiaries of the project:
- Other regional clusters: through the dissemination activities, the partnership will raise awareness on business opportunities and best practices at regional level, targeting the other clusters in their respective regions.
- Other national and European clusters: through the dissemination activities, the partnership will raise awareness on cluster partnership benefits at national and European level
- Other Partnerships supported by this call
- Policy-maker: through the dissemination activities, the partnership will raise awareness on the opportunities of internationalization of european SMEs focused on genomics value chain. Such information will be really helpful for the countries having launched government initiative around genomics and precision medicine particularly.
