What we have learned and what we’ll focus on the next year of the MARILIA project
The first year of the MARILIA project has seen groundbreaking scientific and collaborative achievements in research and implementation of the MARILIA technology, thanks to the hard work carried out by the MARILIA Consortium, whose expertise covers the full research and market development value chain of the project.
As Communication, Dissemination and results Exploitation leader of the MARILIA project, Day One has the role of ensuring that the design of the product which will be developed within the project can satisfy the customers’ requirements, verifying that the business case exists for the product.
At the same time, Day One will pave the way to the post-project industrialisation phase, orchestrating the partners’ IP and coordinating the creation of the startup company which will take care of product engineering and commercialisation.
About Communication and Dissemination, after 12 months of the project, we can say that the Consortium set up a media framework and a communication toolkit to ensure that the project outcomes reach the target communities – via the relevant channels and with clear messages – also becoming the cornerstone for the successful commercialization and market uptake of MARILIA solutions.
The project logo and other elements (graphic and visual, online and offline) of the project’s overall “brand identity”, the project website, and the social media channels are the outcomes that we developed during the first year of MARILIA in order to spread all the key messages that will evolve parallel to the progress of the project, from promoting the project starting point and description of the planned activities, towards the description of the obtained results.
Every day researchers in universities perform scientific activities that can have several implications on European society and people’s daily life, but only a few people really know what’s new in the European research and innovation context.
Generally, the information arrives in a piecemeal and incomplete way to the workers too. It is becoming more and more important that research is accessible to the general public and that the Europan people really understand the importance of Europe’s future economic growth connected with disruptive innovation in products and services. The “Communication about European research projects should aim to demonstrate the ways in which research and innovation are contributing to a European ‘Innovation Union’.
To make this real, during this first year of the project we learned (more and more) that Communication and Dissemination activities strongly rely on the effort from each partner to present the project and its result. To date, partners have been required to perform activities as actively communicating the project, by presenting it at scientific and networking events or talking about MARILIA on social media, websites, and corporate newsletters.
A perfect example of this type of strategy and collaboration is represented by the articles published in the Blog section of the MARILIA website, in which each partner talks about one or more aspects related to his role in the project and about the experience within the Horizon 2020 funded project in general.
Regarding the Exploitation and the go-to-market strategy, we talked about them in a dedicated article on FETFX, that you can read on: MARILIA, bridging the gap between market and research