The Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) has approved the IDEEO project – «Internationalisation and Diversification of European Earth Observation»

IDEEO is funded under the COSME Cluster Go International action and will run over fifteen months, starting from 1st January 2018. The consortium is coordinated by the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies – EARSC and composed of 2 sectorial clusters Pôle Mer Bretagne Atlantique (France) and Cluster Lucano di Bioeconomia (Italy). The NEREUS network is also involved as partners for dissemination and contact with the regions.

The overarching objective of the IDEEO project is the creation of a new European partnership which will promote internationally the use of European Earth Observation capability in different sectors such as marine, agriculture, energy etc. In order to meet the expected impacts specified by the Call, IDEEO has defined four specific objectives that will govern the respective activities carried out in the project to:

• Analyse international market and policy aspects in order to define sectors with the highest export potential for the European Earth Observation based solution companies
• Develop a joint cross-cluster and cross-sectorial internationalisation strategy in order to internationally promote the European Earth Observation sector in the selected sectors
• Propose an implementation roadmap facilitating the internationalisation of the European SMEs
• Maximise the impact of the activities through well-defined communication, dissemination, stakeholder engagement and exploitation strategies.

The project kicked-off on January 10th, 2018 at EARSC’s premises in Brussels. Two thematic workshops will be organised around the agriculture sector in Matera, Italy (end of April) and maritime sector in Brest, France (beginning of October) in order to create sinergies with the EO sector and better define internationalisation priorities.