Innovation impact

Funded under the ‘Smart Anything Everywhere’ initiative, DigiFed helps low-digital industries in the European Union (EU) harness cyber-physical and embedded technologies for new market opportunities. The project is part of a wider push to implement a Europe-wide approach to digital transformation. Having previously led the FED4SAE project, Ana-Maria Gheorghe, Linda Ligios, Ramona Marfievici (all Digital Catapult) and Isabelle Dor (CEA-Leti) bring a wealth of experience to DigiFed. HiPEAC caught up with them to find out more.

Catapulting innovation

Building new innovation pathways with DigiFed

What does DigiFed aim to achieve?

DigiFed helps EU industries digitize their products and services to reach new markets enabled by cyber-physical and embedded systems. The project supports small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and mid-caps in the EU through cascade funding and by supplying technology expertise and innovation management. The objective is to support the companies selected to achieve sufficient technical maturity in specific projects to allow them access to the market, creating solutions to enable new use cases and services.

Aided by European funding, DigiFed promotes cross-border collaborations between companies, generating new opportunities beyond national and regional initiatives. Opportunities for collaboration are broad in terms of, for example, technologies, business objectives, market opportunities, and application domains. However, all these opportunities share a focus on supporting low-digital companies to progress towards digitalization and addressing more traditional application sectors where the digitalization gap is more evident.

How will it achieve its aims?

Part of the Smart Anything Everywhere initiative, the DigiFed consortium brings together 12 partners with expertise in digital technologies and innovation management from nine countries. DigiFed offers €3.9 million in ‘cascade funding’ to SMEs and midcaps to enhance their assets through the inclusion of innovative digital technologies. In addition, the project offers technical expertise provided by research and technology organizations (RTOs), universities, accelerators and industrial entities, along with innovation management support. To this end, DigiFed implements three interrelated innovation pathways:

How does DigiFed encourage a pan-European approach to innovation?

Central to the three innovation pathways proposed by DigiFed are cross-border collaborations between the different stakeholders. Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) members of the DigiFed consortium work with and enhance cooperation within established ecosystems, linking to other networks to create an EU-wide federation of DIHs. These DIHs offer sustainable crossborder services and partnerships between relevant European innovation stakeholders (e.g. RTOs, universities, accelerators, etc.) and actively promote open calls and matchmaking.

Through the three innovation pathways described above, DigiFed has so far supported 117 start-ups / SMEs / mid-caps from 23 EU and associated countries. The projects selected cover a wide variety of application domains, including industry 4.0, agritech,

• Application Experiment: a cascade funding pathway that selects and finances SMEs and mid-caps to develop CPS solutions based on existing or to-be-developed prototypes and products. • Generic Experiment: this revolves around key-enablingtechnology building blocks developed by an RTO through exploration of the international market and value-chain requirements. This inquiry is conducted with SMEs participating in activities such as workshops to implement advanced technology demonstrators with co-funding from regional authorities. • Digital Challenge: an innovation initiative introduced by

DigiFed, and designed by Digital Catapult, where a large enterprise (the ‘digital challenge owner’) acts as an early adopter seeking cutting-edge digital solutions to a defined challenge. The purpose is to highlight attractive market needs to be addressed through CPS and embedded systems to solve industry challenges.

health, transportation, manufacturing, construction and water management.

What is the Digital Challenge, the new innovation tool introduced by DigiFed?

The Digital Challenge programme was designed to create partnerships between industry leaders and technology start-ups and mid-caps to accelerate the adoption of advanced technologies, while addressing key industrial challenges and opportunities. A new innovation pathway, it leverages DigiFed’s international networks to identify industry challenges from different countries and connect their owners to the skills and expertise required to solve problems aligned with key business objectives.

Corporate organizations are invited to participate in this open innovation initiative and support European companies with match funding and access to training, sites, etc. to develop a solution for a specific digital or technological challenge.

This innovation pathway allows participants to minimize risks, offers them an alternative way of procuring new suppliers from a broader innovation ecosystem, and accelerates the company’s digital transformation journey. It unlocks new opportunities, helps develop new skills, and builds new partnerships and products. Innovators can also benefit from access to the network of DIHs, along with technical and business support, webinars and networking opportunities.

FURTHER INFORMATION: digifed.org DigiFed has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 872088.

Water, water, everywhere: How DigiFed tackles real-world challenges

One of the three Digital Challenges DigiFed is tackling focuses on building next-generation performance solutions for predictive operation of water systems. While 72% of the earth’s surface is covered with water, 97% of this water is salty or brackish. The distribution of the remaining 3% (freshwater) is very uneven. As a result, many regions in the world are water-stressed areas, while the potential of unconventional water resources, such as seawater / brackish water desalination, remains relatively untapped.

Desalination is a separation process used to reduce the dissolved salt content of saline water to a usable level. Reverse osmosis, the most advanced and energy-efficient system, is the leading desalination technology globally. The key element of the process is a semipermeable membrane that, applying pressure, allows water to pass through while rejecting salts. A stream of permeate water, i.e. water for consumption (once remineralised), is produced.

Currently, in the water-management industry, the monitoring of the performance of reverse osmosis elements is carried out through manual, laborious and time-consuming procedures. This is not practical, especially for large desalination plants comprising thousands of elements.

This is why the Spanish company ACCIONA, a desalination market leader, came to DigiFed, seeking innovative digital solutions that could continuously monitor the performance of each membrane element in a multi-vessel array. ACCIONA needed an end-to-end digital solution for measuring, reporting, and visualizing the properties of each membrane. Thanks to the immediate detection of malfunctioning elements, this would facilitate maintenance and result in fewer plant shutdowns. DigiFed paired ACCIONA with Instrumentation Technologies from Slovenia to develop a bespoke solution for ACCIONA’s business needs. The result is SWICSSY, an end-to-end system that exploits new ways to measure various physical quantities to assess the performance of the reverse osmosis membranes in real-time and identify problematic membranes inside the vessel, allowing the development of predictive operational strategies.

SWICCSY will help ACCIONA monitor the health of critical infrastructure such as desalination facilities. It will support plant operators to adopt the optimal strategy in terms of shutdowns, rotation or replacement of membranes, thereby extending the lifetime of the plants. This is a unique opportunity to monitor the health of a desalination plant using an innovative technology and methodology.

Ana Jiménez Banzo, who heads the innovation management department at ACCIONA, commented: ‘DigiFed’s Digital Challenge allowed ACCIONA to find a cutting-edge technological solution in record time. It made it possible to identify best-in-class technology developers and to achieve a strategic alliance with Instrumentation Technologies to develop SWICCSY, a game-changing solution for the desalination market.’