Innovation Forum in Lithuania

From today (4 December) to 6 December the first Vilnius Innovation Forum 2013 “Innovation Drift” is taking place in Lithuania - and SusChem, SPIRE and the Bio-based Industries JTI will all be contributing. The Lithuanian capital is hosting this international event designed to create a high-level discussion platform on innovation, best practices and impact for European economic growth.

The Forum, which is part of the programme for Lithuania’s Presidency of the Council of the EU, is organized by the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Lithuania in cooperation with the Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology.

In an extensive programme of keynote presentations, panel discussions and industry visits SusChem personalities and SusChem inspired chemical innovation will be well represented.

Innovative Europe
In the afternoon of 4 December SusChem board member Gernot Klotz will be taking part in a panel discussion on the strategic paths that industry sectors are developing to build an innovative Europe.

The panel will debate the practices of leading companies in employing innovation and creating an innovative environment for employees, customers and society. Panellists will review key technological innovations in Europe and discuss how they can enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and larger business and industry interests to address fast-paced global economic growth and achieve improved performance.

Other panellists include representatives of Microsoft, Thermo Fischer Scientific and Lithuanian government and industry leaders.

SPIRE and BioBased Industries
Thursday 5 December will see an all-day conference session on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and, of course, the two SusChem Horizon 2020 initiatives – SPIRE and the Biobased Industries Consortium (BIC) – will be taking centre stage.

The BIC JTI session will include contributions from Barend Verachtert of DG Research and Innovation and Kare-Rijs Nielsen of Novozymes, while the SPIRE presentations will be led by A.SPIRE Executive Director Loredana Ghinea and include a contribution from Carmine Marzano from DG Research and Innovation.

SPIRE - PPPs Info Days
If you want to find out more information on SPIRE and the other PPPs in Horizon 2020 then there are still a few places available for the Horizon 2020 PPP Information Day that is taking place in Brussels on 16 to 17 December. Don’t delay register today!

Regional partner for #useCO2 Project

The Smart CO2 Transformation (SCOT) project is supported under ‘Regions of Knowledge’ in FP7 to develop a Strategic European Research Agenda aimed at improving the technical and economic performance of emerging CO2 transformation technologies. The project was launched in October 2013 by four partner regions in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK and it now requires the participation of an additional partner (regional authority or organization supported by a region). Could this be you? 

Reducing CO2 emissions, protecting the environment and our resources, while reducing consumption of scarce raw materials are some major challenges facing society. The EU has adopted ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050. So far, most attention from policy makers and others has been paid to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies that aim to concentrate CO2 emitted from large industrial sites and store it in deep geological sites.

The SCOT project is complementary to this approach but focuses on an emerging research area with great economic growth potential: the recycling of CO2 through its transformation into valuable products via chemical or biological technologies – a topic close to SusChem and SPIRE’s research agendas and the subject of many SusChem tweets with the hashtag #useCO2 and previous SusChem blog articles.

In addition to significantly reducing net CO2 emissions, this approach brings the benefit of reducing the consumption of non-renewable resources and CO2 is no longer considered as a waste but as a significant resource.

SCOT is the first ever European regional initiative in the field of CO2 recycling. The consortium gathers four regions which are strongly committed and already well advanced in this emerging area of CO2 recycling. Through a stronger coordination of their individual efforts, the SCOT project aims to:

• define a Strategic European Research Agenda aimed at improving the technico-economic performance of emerging CO2 transformation technologies and at developing new breakthrough solutions and market applications
• attract additional EU clusters, regions and investors to participate in multi-disciplinary research programmes and other collaborative actions defined in a Joint Action Plan
• propose structural policy measures to favour the transition to a new European society based on the paradigm of “CO2-as-a-resource”, and significantly improve the EU’s overall competitive position and environmental performance on the international scene. 

Partner profile

The SCOT consortium has a dedicated Work Package on internationalization and mentoring. And the new project partner will benefit from this aspect of the project. The mentoring activities will be divided into two separate sets of actions: developing research and clustering capacities in the mentored region, and reinforcing the clustering/networking capacities of more advanced regions through a mutual exchange of best practices

Such mentoring activities will be the ideal opportunity for the mentored region to:

• reinforce its research and innovation capacities in the area of CO2 recycling, 
• and to learn how to structure and operate an innovation-driven cluster. 

The deadline for submitting an application to join the project is 3 January 2014 and the selection will happen by 10 January.

Further information on participation can be found on this link and interested parties can find the details of the application process here. Alternatively contact Talia Brun at Axelera.

EU Chemistry Employment Survey

Update February 2014. The deadline for input for the EU Employment Survey has been extended to 28 February. To access the questionnaire (now available only in English) click here.

For more details on the the survey see below.

In which European country do chemists and chemical engineers enjoy the highest salary? Where are the best prospects for employment? And which of the various chemical sub-disciplines offer the most jobs? Getting answers to these questions is the aim of the first European employment survey for chemists and chemical engineers. The deadline for contributing to the confidential survey is 31 December 2013.

The employment survey has been commissioned by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) to provide details about the current employment situation for chemists and chemical engineers across Europe and to understand future needs for post-secondary education in Europe.

The survey is open to all chemists and chemical engineers in Europe and is supported by Cefic, EuCheMS, the European Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Network (EC2E2N). The project is being coordinated and managed by the European Chemistry Thematic Network Association (ECTNA). And all chemist and chemical engineers in Europe are encouraged to take part in the survey. Chemists who are members of national societies affiliated to EuCheMS should have already received notification of the survey.

However, chemists and engineers from industry are often under represented in national chemical societies so it is important that the survey is accessible to them as well.

24 languages
The questionnaire was available in 24 European languages and all responses are saved anonymously. A valid email address is requested at the start of survey, but this is just a check to prevent misuse. The email is only stored (independently from your responses to the survey) if you want to receive the results of the survey directly when they are published in 2014.

The survey has six general pages (on Personal data, Education, Employment, on Job Training and Salary) all of which provide fields for free-text responses.

You can find the survey at www.chemsurvey.eu. National coordinators for the survey have been nominated and if you have any questions about the survey they should be your first port of call. They can be contacted via the Survey site.

The original deadline for completing the survey was 31 December 2013.

One Million in Prizes! Ten years of LRI Innovative Science Awards

The recent LRI Annual Workshop in Brussels on 21 November was the occasion to celebrate ten years of the LRI Innovative Science award. The event saw the presentation of this prestigious award for younger scientists to its tenth recipient: Dr. Sabine Langie of VITO. Dr Langie received her prize of € 100 000 from Prof. Ellen Fritsche of the University of Dusseldorf: herself a previous winner and now a member of LRI’s External Scientific Advisory Panel (ESAP).

The Cefic-LRI award programme has been hugely successful over the past decade. The LRI Innovative Science Award was established in 2004 to inspire highly innovative and industry relevant projects in biomedical toxicology and ecotoxicology led by promisingly early career scientists.

The prize of € 100 000 has been awarded annually ever since - boosting the careers of ten younger European scientists in the challenging fields with which LRI is engaged.

This year’s award – making a total of one million euros distributed to research projects under this element of the Cefic-LRI programme so far – was presented by Prof Fritsche (below, left) to Dr Sabine Langie (below, right) of the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) at the LRI Annual Workshop.

Dr. Langie will use the award to broaden her current work on the analysis of DNA methylation patterns in the saliva of children participating in two significant birth cohort studies in Flanders. She is exploring the hypothesis that prenatal chemical exposures can alter foetal DNA methylation patterns and predispose the child to develop allergic diseases later in life.

The use of saliva is less burdensome for the children in study and easier to collect than, for example, blood samples. The ultimate aim of the study is to develop prevention strategies (including reduction of chemical exposure), particularly in children, and reduce the societal burden associated with allergic diseases.

Career boost
Reviewing the history of the award Prof. Fritsche, who won the award in 2006, described the prize as: “Nitromethane for an Early Career – the LRI award was a big accelerator for my career - a rocket!” This view was echoed by contributions from other awardees over the years.

Dr Roman Ashauer of York University won the award in 2007 and says: “The Cefic-LRI Award allowed me to pursue my own ideas. It was motivation, encouragement and the crucial bit of extra fuel in the tank to push the envelope.”

Similarly Prof Paul van den Brink of Wageningen University, the winner in 2005, commented: “The award gave me the first sense of academic freedom. It was a real push to my career and opened doors for further funding.”

The first ever winner of the award in 2004 Prof Roger Godschalk of Maastricht University is still feeing the effects of the award saying: “With the LRI-award, I was able to put my ideas into practice. It eventually evolved in to my own research line at our institute, which I can continue to build even 10 years after winning the CEFIC LRI-award.”

“Winning this award has been a pivotal factor in my research and professional career. It has allowed me to create my research group, managing my own research budget and having two PhD students working alongside me in the project,” said 2010 winner Dr Maria Saborit of Birmingham University.

Data mining
Delegates to the LRI workshop also got an update on the work of 2012 winner Dr Andreas Bender of the University of Cambridge who is looking to determine biologically relevant effects of compound exposure by chemical, biological and phenotypic data integration.

The in-silico prediction of in-vivo toxicology of a particular compound is a non trivial problem due to the lack of direct correlations between structural features and toxicity. However chemical, protein target and phenotypic data provide complementary bioactivity data and Dr Bender’s work is based on the hypothesis that more accurate toxicity predictions could be made by integrating these data. His core expertise is in data mining and the research has had success in predicting likely protein targets for compounds based on their structure in areas such as mode of action analysis, modelling of bioactivities, natural products and traditional medicines.

The performance of the model algorithm used is increasing all the time and Dr Bender is looking to the ultimate objective of automated prediction of targets given only their chemical structure. These techniques will be useful in future personalised medicine scenarios and he has recently received a € 1.5 million ERC Starter Grant to extend the work towards bioactive mixture modelling.

More information
Details of the next LRI Innovative Science Award will be released in early 2014. The focus of this eleventh competition will be in one of the environmental areas of research covered by LRI. For more details keep an eye on the Cefic-LRI website and to find out more about all previous winners click here.

SusChem Horizon 2020 Brokerage: 31 January 2014

It has just been announced that SusChem will be running a Brokerage and Project Submission Workshop on 31 January 2014 at the Sheraton Brussels Hotel. This event will help SusChem stakeholders further progress their collaborative efforts in project building for Horizon 2020 and follows up on an overwhelming request for further brokerage activity early in Horizon 2020 in the feedback from our very successful pre-brokerage event in October.

The venue for the January Brokerage and Project Submission workshop will be the Sheraton Brussels Hotel at Place Rogier 3 in Brussels.

In December the first calls for Horizon 2020 will be published and it will be time to finalise partners for projects and develop your proposals. So join SusChem on 31 January to complete your project plans for the upcoming and future calls with the support of SusChem’s Innovation Managers and EU funding experts.

31 January will be the perfect occasion to move forward with your ideas and projects for Horizon 2020!

Pre-Brokerage Presentations 
If you would like to see highlights, including a presentation on Horizon 2020 by Søren Bøwadt, Programme Officer in the Directorate for Industrial Technology at the European Commission's DG Research and Innovation,  from the successful Pre-Brokerage event please click here.

And watch out for further details and how to register in December. Details will be published here and on the SusChem website. Demand for this event will be high so block the date today!

EcoMondo 2013 hosts European Platforms for Innovation and Sustainability

Last week (6 to 9 November), SusChem and SPIRE were presented as part of the new European initiatives to enable and facilitate sustainable growth at EcoMondo 2013. This is one of the largest events in Southern Europe for the exploitation and recycling of materials and for the development of the Green Economy in Europe.

EcoMondo is one of the largest trade fairs in the sector and the event took place in Rimini, Italy. It is one of the most accredited platforms in southern Europe and the Mediterranean basin with regard to innovation in sustainable development, with an equal focus on new technologies and best practice and on the uptake of new markets. The event’s ambition is to facilitate the key elements of a sustainable economy in Europe including  industrial research, more cooperation between the public and private sectors, funding, new quality standards and not only more, but also better, outreach to the European public.

The event traditionally prioritizes those areas where significant progress can be achieved at a pan-European level. This year’s conference focused, among others, on key areas of innovation for SusChem such as treatment of waste water, bio-based industries and smart cities. Nonetheless, EcoMondo 2013 also invited panellists and speakers to discuss a broader array of topics including waste management, clean-up of contaminated soil and air pollution.

SusChem: An EU and National approach 

SusChem’s brokerage activities and projects have already been gathering stakeholders and interested parties to deliver real innovation in areas of interest at EcoMondo. Antonia Morales Perez (right), CEFIC Innovation Manager and a member of the SusChem secretariat, introduced the EcoMondo audience to the many tools and opportunities available through SusChem.

Antonia’s presentation highlighted the importance of the SusChem network that was able to reach into many Member States. SusChem’s National Technology Platforms (NTPs), already present in 11 European countries and with Switzerland soon joining, offer a unique structure to support SusChem’s work for Europe 2020 with a joint European vision firmly rooted in national strategies through localized networks of industry and academia. Practically that translates into supporting the engagement of SusChem’s national members in transnational collaborations in EU collaborative projects and programmes like FP7 and the forthcoming Horizon 2020 calls.

During the meeting Antonia was interviewed in Spanish about SusChem activities. Her interview can be viewed below.



The key role of NTPs in the implementation of the SusChem strategy and action plans was highlighted, particularly in reference to developing Strategic Research and Innovation Agendas, including identification of skill requirements and regulatory barriers and encouraging industry participation in Horizon 2020 through active cooperation with partnerships in Member States.

Inspiration for SPIRE

EcoMondo was also the venue where the audience were able to appreciate the innovative approach of the SPIRE Public-Private Partnership. Loredana Ghinea (right), SPIRE’s Executive Director, explained how the value-chain of the process industry has come together to initiate a collaboration with the European Commission for a new systematic approach throughout the complete production cycle to ensure radical resource and energy efficiency.

Loredana explained how realizing the SPIRE vision means reducing the use of feedstock and emissions, re-use of energy and resources between different parties in the value chain, replacing current feedstock with renewable sources –including sources such as CO2. This can pave the way to re-inventing the whole interaction among all the technologies used in the value-chain of the process industry.

Find out more about SPIRE here.

SusChem Chairman shares view on how to boost EU growth

Dr Klaus Sommer, Chairman of the SusChem board and President of A.SPIRE aisbl - the legal entity backing the SPIRE PPP, has put his views on what is needed to exit the economic crisis and help Europe's economy to grow as part of a series of video testimonials on the Horizon 2020 website. You can watch his video below. If you get an issue with playback (may not work with iOS) you can also access the video here.



Dr. Sommer said: "I think in Europe we have one disadvantage, and that is actually beginning with an advantage. The advantage is that, in research, we produce great results: we're very competitive in basic research and in fundamental inventions. But the issue is that we are not as good in turning this into commercially successful results. And this has been referred to as the 'valley of death' a couple of times, which means that we cannot take these results to something commercially viable. So I think Horizon 2020, with its focus on demonstration and piloting, will give us a great opportunity to take some of these results to something that business people like and build businesses on and make money with."

To find out more about SusChem visit our website and more information about the SPIRE PPP can be found here. 

PPP information days 
Information Days on the Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) under Horizon 2020 are being organized by the European Commission on 16-17 December, 2013, at the Charlemagne Building, Brussels. Central to this event will be the presentation of the first research and innovation call topics for the SPIRE PPP under Horizon 2020. More information on the SPIRE session in the event will be available shortly, but registration to the event is open now.

The Information Days with cover the four research contractual PPPs envisaged under Horizon 2020: Factories of the Future; Energy-efficient Buildings; Green Vehicles; and Sustainable Process Industries.

On the first day of the meeting a plenary session is planned for the four cPPPs and then parallel workshops for each PPP focusing on the presentation of their new Multi-annual Roadmaps, opportunities in the calls included in the 2014-2015 Work Programme for Horizon 2020 and brokerage activities.

On the Tuesday (17 December 2013) a second plenary session for the PPPs is foreseen with contributions from Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science and Neelie Kroes, EC Vice-President and Commissioner for Digital Agenda.

The programme also includes a final assessment of the first three Research PPPs established under the Recovery Plan, reports on success stories in the domains of the four PPPs, and a roundtable discussion on the expected impact of the PPPs.