The Seal of Excellence (SoE) is a new initiative launched at European level in October 2015 that aims to foster synergies between H2020 and other funding resources, mainly at regional and national level. The idea behind this SoE is to offer a gateway to companies and organizations across Europe that apply to the Horizon 2020 Programme and despite of meeting all the stringent thresholds of the calls, they can not be funded due to the lack of available budget. The first instrument where the Seal of Excellence has been implanted is the H2020 SME instrument. In that context, this Seal of Excellence linked to the SME instrument proposers offers a clear added value to national and regional authorities as a reliable filter of promising companies with international ambition, meriting an European funding but unable to achieve it, but still worth to be supported. For the phase 1, during 2015, a number of countries and regions have already been able to launch at national or regional level support mechanism for the Seal of Excellence phase 1 holders, mainly channelled through the “de minimis” regime. For the phase 2, the paths are not so direct considering Technology Readiness Level of 6 as starting point. This is the rationale of this proposal: to use the peer learning advanced methodology, proposed by the topic, together with the current tools from the lean start-up methodologies to develop and test different approaches to the valorisation of the Seal of Excellence for the SME instrument phase 2 within a small consortium of national innovation agencies (CDTI (ES), Enterprise Ireland (IE) and TEKES (FI) with a long tradition of collaboration among them, a strong know-how on the SME instrument and in charge of national programmes in support of SMEs through grants, loans and/or equity.

This 3SST2015 project is aimed at supporting the emergence of a European SST service built on a network of existing SST assets, notably sensors (radar, laser and telescopes) owned by SST Consortium Member States. This will require the commitment of Consortium Member States owing relevant assets to cooperate and provide an anti-collision, fragmentation and re-entry service at European level in order to increase the autonomy of Europe concerning the operational objectives derived from the SST decision, which will be partially fulfilled by the operation of the initial European SST system. Given that this system is mainly based on national systems, at the initial stage many of the activities will be based at national level. At the same time, and in order to achieve the convergence within a joint action that will allow the minimum desirable level of performance, an appropriate degree of coordination between SST Consortium Member States is needed. The project is following a shared working approach between the key players within the field of SST in Europe. Following the guidelines given by the implementing decision of the European Commission (C(2014)6342 final of the 12.09.2014), the backbone of the planned activity is formed by a set of SST committees forming the decision platform of the SST Consortium, composed of the five designated national entities in cooperation mechanisms with the EU SatCen. Three Committees are foreseen for the governing structure of the SST Consortium: the Steering Committee as the decision platform, the Technical Committee as the professional motor and to the Security Committee dealing with bi- and multilateral aspects of security constraints and issues. The main activities are addressed in terms of: Performance assessment and architecture of SST, an SST Action Plan” and the Priority upgrading of existing sensors owned by the Member States member of the SST consortium.