Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Europe’s economy. They represent 99% of all businesses in the EU. In the past five years, they have created around 85% of new jobs and provided two-thirds of the total private sector employment in the EU. The European Commission considers SMEs and entrepreneurship as key to ensuring economic growth, innovation, job creation, and social integration in the EU. (See here)

The H2020 BlueBRIDGE project shares the commitment and for this reason it launched its Competitive Call for SMEs designed to support small and medium enterprises in improving their data management practices thus paving the way for enhanced data products and services.

The 4 winners of the call AquaBioTech Group, Flyby, Sinay and StatnMap were selected based on strict criteria, prioritizing the business growth potential for the blue sector all 4 winning companies belong to.

The BlueBRIDGE Competitive Call for SMEs

The objective of the call is to empower 4 European SMEs working on collaborative data management for the fisheries, marine, environmental & ecological domains or in the aquaculture sector by providing them access to the BlueBRIDGE resources (datasets, services and technologies and data analytics). The support offered by BlueBRIDGE will help SMEs to solve data management issues, to improve their existing services or technologies and to enhance their portfolio through the development of new services.

As the Call for SMEs was not foreseen in the original budget of the BlueBRIDGE project, no financial support has been offered through the call. This makes the results of the Call even more relevant.

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