Project with participation of PEMAS
Green Technologies bring competitive advantages for the future of air transport systems. To ensure the competitivity of local agents, the European regions must carefully guide their investigation finances and Technologic Development (IDT), effectively matching to the various technologic and environment challenges faced by aviation industry, and also for generating economic growth and improve entrepreneurship level in the sector.
It was in this context that the cooperative project CARE was created – formed by 10 partners, and took place since January 2012 to the final of 2014. It focussed around four big areas: Energy-efficient on-board systems, Eco-design, Greening in Air Traffic Management, Multimodal transport system.
The CARE Consortium presented 9 aviation clusters (about 65% of the European industry) and a specialized consulting company. This project had, as a starting point, a profound technical and economy study of different aeronautic European clusters, where were analysed the competitive and technical abilities of the regions in question, as their economic priorities. The comprehension of that regions dynamics, Europeans and internationals allowed to plot a course for the collective roadmap creation: CARE Joint Action Plan (JAP). This join action plan is reflected in a document where were defined 21 actions – a common strategy for CARE clusters based in major pillars: excellence, efficiency and the visibility of the aerial European regions.
The CARE members believed that the main driver for creating value are the technologic and innovation performance. The first, and ambitious pillar of JAP, was the improvement of the level of excellence and quality of those clusters – beginning in the laboratories and ending in the industries. For that matter, it was implemented a common agenda of investigation (CARE Common Research Agenda) – a interregional technologic roadmap about topics of common interest.
The CARE consortium created and boosted the community of stakeholders, promoting dialogue and brainstorming about green technologies applied to aviation, leading to the creation of various Interesting Groups for the investigation of these emergent technologies. As a result of this process, more than 10 concepts of projects were developed and supported by the consortium, through participation on relevant events in industry – with potential clients and finance opportunities.
The second pillar of this project aims to improve the efficiency of the regional ecosystems of CARE members. Different actions started – the implementation of cooperative activities – once the technologies are more cross-sectional and complementary between sectors. There was also considerable effort to leverage financing of IDT regional projects with development directed to a more green/technologic, energy- efficient and clean aviation.
Apart from the already existing systems of regional funding mechanisms, the CARE consortium believed that a proper coordination and collaboration between aeronautics and regional financing funds was needed. Therefore, CARE developed a viability study for creating ERA-NET mechanism dedicated to environmental performance in civil aviation and that could evolve private financing funds. In 2014 this mechanism was designed and structured, in order that would be implemented in 2015.
Finally, the third pillar of CARE project consisted in raising the support and international visibility of 6 principals aeronautic Europeans regions. These clusters benefited of the experience of more mature clusters that were involved in different actions of CARE program.
The visibility of the European know-how about the green aviation was the main point promoting CARE – with international actions that started with the collaborations between different SME and others players of industry, counting with partners from Canada and Mexico.
PEMAS – Portuguese Association to Aeronautic Industry – was one of the supported clusters and involved in different activities from CARE project.
The promotion and dissemination activities organized by PEMAS were centred on AIR DAYS 2014 (Lisbon, October 2014) – 3 day event focused on international networking between Aeronautic Industry, SMEs and Investigation Centres, interested on the cooperation for future aviation projects based on European Program Horizon 2020 framework.
The main European players were involved on the Horizon 2020 Program (JTI SESAR, JTI CLEAN SKY e DG RTD Transport) to present funding opportunities for 2015. It was an excellent opportunity for the participants obtain bilateral contacts – nearly 149 bilateral contacts were made with European Commission and JTI representatives.