The EC funded EFPF project had allocated €2.5 Million to provide Financial Support to third parties to undertake up to 20 sub-projects focusing on enriching the EFPF federation with innovative solutions, validation of existing solutions and integration of external systems and platforms. The open call activity ran over several months and based on the extensive awareness activities a total of 471 applications were registered on the EFPF application submission page.
By the submission deadline, 125 applications from 25 EU countries were finalised. The adjecent figure presents the overview of the final open call applications. From the submitted applications, oOver 70% were about creating (Type 1) new solutions using EFPF tools. Over 15% were applications related to integration (Type 3) of platform and services and over 10% the applications focused on validation (Type 2) of existing solutions.
The overall results were considered as a great success for the open-call awareness campaign of the EFPF project. The project has managed to get the attention of hundreds of highly diverse organisations from different European countries. The number of 125 final applications is much higher than the relevant KPI defined in the project, which was to attract over 50 applications.
To evaluate the applications, a 3 phased evaluation approach was designed as shown in the adjacent figure. Moreover, external evaluators were brought in to help with the selection process. The selection of the external expert evaluators was supported by an advertisement campaign on the EFPF project website and social media channels. Out of 32 shortlisted candidates, only 15 external evaluators were selected based on the relevant of their background/expertise with the EFPF topic, their experience in EU funded projects, no-conflict with the open-call applications, and finally the available funding for the compensation of external evaluators. The external evaluators were complemented by internal experts from the project.
The evaluators were asked to rank the applications based on the criteria shown in the adjecent figure.
Each received application was evaluated by 2 external and 1 internal evaluators. The final selection of the 20 applications was made based on the highest ranking/score in each of the 3 evaluation categories.
The 20 sub-projects enhance the EFPF platform in the following 3 categories:
10 sub-projects focusing on: development of digital manufacturing applications and services for the EFPF platform
5 sub-projects focusing on: validation and/or testing of EFPF platform and services in digital manufacturing domains
5 sub projects focusing on: improve the EFPF ecosystem by connecting multiple stakeholders through innovative solutions
Further details of the selected sub-projects are available on the project website: https://www.efpf.org/sub-projects