DIGITbrain Open Calls

The 2nd Open Call for application experiments will be open from 28^th February 2022, 10:00h (CET Time), and closes 31^st May 2022, 17:00h (CEST Time).

H2020 DIGITbrain project, funded by EC under the Grant Agreement number 952071, includes Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) under two open calls. DIGITbrain has the ambition to transform the CloudiFacturing Solution and ecosystem (developed in the H2020 CloudiFacturing Project) towards the requirements of Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS), utilising the Digital Brain and its underlying technology components as the main innovation of the project.

No. DIGITbrain project is conducting only two Open Calls in 2021 and 2022:

• The 1st Open Call for application experiments has been open from 31st March 2021 for three months until the End of June 2021.
• The 2nd Open Call for application experiments will be open from 28th February 2022 for three months until the End of May 2022.

Take the chance and apply now!

31st May 2022, at 17:00h (Brussels local time)

Who can apply?

End-users:

SME or MidCap end-users from the manufacturing sector (they will be driving the experiments).

Technology providers:

• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs);
• Engineering or software consultants.
• High-Performance Computing (HPC) providers.
• Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) only if they have the SME status.
• NB: An application experiment consortium must include at least one end-user and one technical partner.

1.4M€ has been kept for both Open Calls, 684,600 EUR are left to be disseminated via the second Open Call.

You can find all documents you need for your application on this site.

The contain a lot of hints that you should read to prepare a sound and eligible proposal.

We recommend you read all of them very carefully.

For questions regarding Open Calls process, DIGITbrain Open Call Portal,  administrative issues or other general questions, please contact us in the email address: opencall@digitbrain-dev.innen.it. This email account is managed by CTA, as cascade funding manager.

Regarding your application experiment proposal, you can contact directly with a DIH  involved in the project.  There are six DIHs in the DIGITbrain current consortium that will support you with your questions and ideas and they will help you to prepare a high-quality proposal for your application experiment that well suits our 2nd Open Call and have a high potential impact.   See the regional coverage of the DIH here.

For this 2^nd Open  Call, it is strongly recommended for Applicants to contact DIGITbrain's Digital Innovation hubs (DIHs) in the first stages of the Open Call launch to maximize the impact of the proposal  preparation and Experiment presentation. 

To see Horizon 2020 country profiles, refer to the following link: https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/statistics/framework-programme-facts-and-figures/horizon-2020-country-profiles_en

DIGITbrain considers that proposals requesting a contribution of up to 97,800 EUR per application experiment would allow the specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

The maximum amount of financial support to be granted to one Third Party for one application experiment must not exceed EUR 60,000.  Notices that according to the EC rules, no Third Party is allowed to have received more than EUR 100,000 from Horizon 2020 I4MS and SAE Open Calls.

Experiments are expected to:

• Cover any segments in the manufacturing sector,including (but not limited to) discrete manufacturing, continuous production,or construction. Experiments should aim at covering the development and uptakeof digital technologies especially in segments where these are underexploited.
• To model behaviour of an Industrial Product (manufacturingmachine, line or mechatronic system) with the means of a Digital Twin. 
• To demonstrate benefits in different phases of the life cycle of theIndustrial Product, its adaption and/or evolution to new generations of theindustrial product, considering also environmental impact. 
• It is expected that the software to be used during the experiment already exists, being open source or proprietary.  Experiment partners should have access to the source code or to a programming interface instead, so that the needs of the experiments can be adapted to the DIGITbrain Platform

Regarding the size of the consortium, the minimum number of partners in an application experiment consortium must include:

• one end-user (who will lead the experiment) and;
• one technical partner (who will be practically in the first line, interacting with DIHs and technical core partners).

Regarding the role of the organisations, consortia can consist of the following types of organisations:

• End users from the manufacturing sector,
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs),
• Engineering or Software Consultants (VARs)
• High-Performance Computing (HPC) providers,
• Digital Innovation Hubs,

Regarding the size of the companies involved, SMEs and also Mid-Caps are eligible.

Besides, the consortium doesn’t have to be cross-border. In other words, all partners within the consortium can be from the same country.

Not necessarily.

If the companies  involved are linked companies (some of them holds more than 25% of the shares of the another) they can apply as linked partners within the same  consortium and also individually to different experiments as individual  partners.  However, they will need to meet the budgeting requirements  as one company group. That means that the sum of the budgets presented  by linked companies amongst the experiments shall not exceed 60.000€.

The evaluation criteria are:

• Industrial Relevance,
• Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy,
• Experiment Design,
• Soundness of Technical Approach,
• Quality of Work Plan,
• Resources to be committed, and
• Appropriateness of the Consortium.

The structure of our proposal template follows exactly the evaluation criteria.

Each section in the proposal template is given a mark ranging from 0 to 5.

Industrial relevance section has a threshold of 3 points. At most two categories can be strictly below 3 points, not including section industrial relevance.

Industrial relevance section has a weight of 4, i.e. its mark is multiplied by 4 before summing up the total score. All others have the weight of 1.

Threshold for the total score is 30 out of 50.

There are another non-technical criteria that will be used as tiebreakers. These are:

• Number of SMEs involved;
• Measures to encourage women in the manufacturing and tech community, researchers and start-ups;
• Countries not covered by current DIGITbrain Consortium;
• Cross-border experiments;
• Participation of external DIH.

To apply the rewarding criteria the proposal shall be above the threshold. In other words: the scores obtained with the rewarding criteria do not contribute to reach the minimum threshold.

The 2^nd Open Call will be open for three months, from 28^th February to 31^st of May.

The evaluation and selection process will take two months, from 1^st June 2022 to 31^st July 2022, includingthe eligibility check process during the first two weeks. August is not eligible to be counted in the evaluation process timeline.

The contracting process with Third Parties will take one month, from 1^st to 30^th September 2022

The experiments will start at the beginning of October 2022 and willtake twelve months, until September 2023.

The contract will be signed between Corporación  Tecnológica de Andalucía (hereafter CTA). CTA is a Spanish foundation and private Funding Agency that act in DIGITbrain as cascade funding manager.

One contract per experiment consortium will be signed, with the signature of all parties involved in the same contract.

The contract signature is planned to happen in September 2022.

The current DIGITbrain Consortium already covers, besides the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the following Member States: Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Romania, Serbia, Finland, France, Austria, Portugal.