19 April, 15:00-18:00
Sala Gerace, Department of Computer Science, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo, Pisa
Language: EN
Massimiliano Salerno
Massimiliano Salerno has been wearing many hats in his professional life, engineer, entrepreneur, manager, consultant, teacher, researcher, but he’s been always working in a specific context: innovation! Currently, his main activities are Strategy and Innovation Consultant, and Horizon 2020 Unit Manager at IRPET (Istituto Regionale per la Programmazione Economica Toscana). The Horizon 2020 Unit is a task force in charge of supporting the Tuscan companies to focus their innovation opportunities and both to contextualize them within the correct Horizon 2020 calls, and to structure their projects so that they are compliant with the company’s growth strategy and with the UE’s goal expectations.
Ray Garcia
Ray Garcia is the managing director of Buoyant Capital, a global peer advisory think tank addressing the growth challenges of small to medium sized enterprises. The firm coordinates its team of experts to help its clients improve competitiveness through talent management, global market expansion partnership access, technology asset management, capital investment and restructuring. Buoyant Capital was founded in 2000 in New York City and has helped launch several start-up companies and works as an advisory to company founders, CEO's, and their investors. Ray has over 20 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur, as company CTO co-founder, for four venture-backed companies. Earlier in his career, he worked as an executive for major banks including, Citicorp, Republic National Bank (now HSBC), Bank of America, and as a technology consultant to several large US multi-national corporations. In 2008, he served as an executive in resident at MIT Media Lab. Since 2010 he serves on the advisory board of Baruch College Field Center for Entrepreneurship. From 2011 to 2014, he taught an accelerated course in entrepreneurship at the University of Pisa, Italy, School of Economics, to PhD candidates and International MBA executives with a focus on innovation, technology transfer and venture spin-offs. In 2015 he is serving as a business expert to EU Commission Horizon 2020 SME innovation instrument where he will evaluate commercialization grant proposals of technology ventures and coach company executives who have received grant funding. Ray published the books "StartUP SOAR Coaching" and "Launch a Global Business" which are based on his experiences starting and growing global businesses. The books include the material from his courses, lectures, and coaching. (amazon.com/author/raygarcia)
Abstract
The European Union allocated a large budget to its funding program Horizon 2020 with the clear goal to unleash its SMEs’ full innovation potential. This budget is reserved to the best innovation proposals submitted by SMEs, and for being a member of that club a proposal has to have few and fundamental ingredients. The business has to be presented to appeal to the funding source, address its criteria and administrative procedures, and inform evaluators of the merits of the proposed business.
The EU funding has elements of venture funding in its intentions to allocate capital to breakthrough innovations, which tend to be risky and potentially have far reaching impact on the EU economy.
This session will give you a panoramic view of the objectives expected by the EU from your proposal and the tools which can bring you to clearly state them. The session will end with a direct structure for how to ask for money, using conventional components from venture financing.