Commissioner Oettinger: ECHORD scheme facilitates access to EU-funding for SMEs

This Saturday the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, one of Germany’s most important newspapers, published a half-page article about ECHORD and ECHORD++. The article features the projects ECHORD and ECHORD++ with all their instruments, some success stories and also shows that EU-Commissoner Oettinger holds the ECHORD scheme in high esteem. We were very proud to read that the Commissioner not only mentioned our success in bringing technology from lab to market, but also stressed ECHORD’s importance for the EU’s research funding in general.

Translated into English his quote says:
“The ECHORD project, funded by the European Commission, enabled bringing robotics technology from the lab to the market in more than 50 cases. With the project we also successfully tested the funding of sub-projects via open calls,” says Günther Oettinger, EU-Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. This approach facilitated a non-bureaucratic access to EU-funding, which benefits many small and medium-sized enterprises. “Hence, this so-called cascading funding also plays an important role in our framework programme Horizon 2020,” Oettinger continues.

The whole article (in German) is available online:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/karriere/echord-vom-labor-auf-den-markt-1.3210467