The initial statistics of the first phase 2 SME call have just been announced (thanks to Steve Bradley via LinkedIn for the alert)..These show a total of 580 validated proposals were received of which 7 address the space theme. The country distribution is similar to phase 1; Italy (70), Spain (69), UK (61). Some 78% of the proposals came from single companies. Results of the awards will be made public next April.

Just to recall that phase 2 is for "Demonstration, Market Replication, R&D" and can lead to.€0.5m to €2.5m for a 1-2 years project.

In the meantime the 2nd call for Phase 1 has also closed. Phase 1 is for "Concept and Feasibility" with funding of 50k over 6 months to develop an initial business plan. A total of 1944 proposals were received of which 57 were within the space priority. A comparison of the 2 calls is given below. What stands out is the lack of success rate for space proposals; only 6.5% of those validated were successful compared to close to 50% across the whole programme.

This led me to look at the previous results and the proposals which were successful since the 155 awards have been announced also.

Of these 4, only 1 is in the domain of EO although I did find two others which could have an EO component.

Overall the results are very disappointing. Given the predominance of SME's working in the EO sector I would have expected to see a stronger showing. Are companies unaware, do they not need funding, or do they find their early funding elsewhere? We shall promote the H2020 SME opportunity more strongly (and we held our first EO focused research networking meeting recently) but with a 6.5% success rate it will not be easy to encourage companies to devote time to preparing proposals. I'll watch the outcome of future calls with interest.

It is almost 4 months since I last posted - apologies for the long wait!

Yesterday, I was at the Imagine 2014 conference organised by Eurogi. This year is their 20^th anniversary and for us it is 25 years since EARSC was formed. Over lunch, Eurogi had invited EARSC and 3 other organisations all celebrating an anniversary this year to make a short speech at their jubilee celebration. It was a simple but nice occasion. I spoke of the changes we have seen in the industry over the last 25 years and how all aspects of imagery (temporal resolution, spatial resolution, spectral resolution) have improved. Recently we have seen new initiatives being launched from Skybox, Planetlabs and others and new technology and new business models ar changing the sector completely; I wonder what it will look like in a further 25 years?

Afterwards I was member of a panel discussing the user uptake of Copernicus. The one really strong message that came out was about awareness. The GI experts attending the conference wondered where they could get data from Copernicus, what it looks like, what can be done with it? These are intermediate users with a knowledge of the sector including satellite data. If they are bemused about these questions then there really needs to be a massive awareness campaign about Copernicus and what it can offer. Reflecting on this afterwards with another expert, we discussed the fact that a commercial operator with a new satellite system in orbit would be sending out their sale-force to all their customers and executing a large and targeted marketing campaign. The EC should consider the same for Copernicus - but maybe using the value-adding community as the sales-force?

If we consider that companies could be doing this already then that probably would be the case except that they still have concerns about how much they can be involved (as addressed in our last position paper). Investment is needed in awareness raising. Industry would be doing this if they saw a clear business opportunity. Amid their doubts about their ability to really exploit Copernicus this cannot happen.