DigiFed’s main objective is to encourage the adoption of advanced digital technologies by EU SMEs with a focus on nondigital businesses. DigiFed implements a business plan for the sustainability of the federation of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs), while providing significant support mechanisms for individual and groups of SMEs to foster the introduction of digital technologies in their product and service offerings. DigiFed aims to engage at least 200 SMEs and midcaps from all across Europe in its innovation programme. At least 80 of these will receive also funding support and benefits from one of Digifed’s innovation pathways- half of these will be businesses with low digital maturity.
DigiFed’s business model is based on collaborative investments with fair return for contributing parties, realised by our ability to reduce innovation risks and generate new business opportunities. DigiFed leverage both funding from private sector and public co-funding from regions of DIHs, in order to maximise value from EU investments. These will be used for the development of truly differentiated and impactful digitization solutions targeting the needs of different markets, penetrating the value chain down to non-technology companies.
DigiFed focuses on Cyber Physical and Embedded Systems with a particular attention on security and privacy, autonomy and human-machine interaction. Its innovation pathways offer two main instruments: Generic Experiments target a group of mainly non-tech SMEs to implement advanced technology demonstrators with co-funding from regional authorities; Application Experiments allow individual SMEs to define an R&I project to disrupt, upgrade or manufacture an innovative digital product or service.
DigiFed gathers 6 DIHs from different countries with established ecosystems and will continue expanding and linking with other DIHs and DIH networks through its lifetime to create a truly EU-wide offering of sustainable cross-border DIH services.
