DigiPrime Open Calls - Frequently Asked Questions
To advertise the DigiPrime Open Calls and to support possible applicants, an “Info Day” session has been held on the 22nd of June. The slides used during the session are available at this link.
Q: Two SMEs in the same group (they are SMEs considering the total amount of the data referring to all companies in the group) can participate with two different proposals? Two SMEs in the same group can apply with the same proposal as a consortium?
A: If the two SMEs are independent they can participate with two proposals or as a small consortium. The definition of SMEs independence is provided in “REGULATION (EU) No 1290/2013 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL – Article 8“, and here reported.
“1. Two legal entities shall be regarded as independent of each other where neither is under the direct or indirect control of the other or under the same direct or indirect control as the other.
2. For the purposes of paragraph 1, control may, in particular, take either of the following forms:
(a) the direct or indirect holding of more than 50 % of the nominal value of the issued share capital in the legal entity concerned, or of a majority of the voting rights of the shareholders or associates of that entity;
(b) the direct or indirect holding, in fact or in law, of decision-making powers in the legal entity concerned.”
Q: What’s the expected timing for the final feedback on the proposal (approval / non approval)?
A: Two months after the deadline.
Q: Does the 6-month timing for the completion of the project start at approval?
A: When the project is selected there is a month to prepare and sign the Grant Agreement. The 6- months timing starts at the GA signature.
Q: The proposal template asks about “impact of the DigiPrime activities and related risks”. It is unclear if it must describe the risk assessment for the implementation of the proposed service, or if the text refers to risks for the platform due to the new service (e.g., a bug in the new service slows down or crashes Digiprime platform), or to something else.
A: “impact of the DigiPrime activities and related risks” means risks for the platform due to the integration of the new service.
Q: The proposal template asks about the “go-to-market level”. What does this exactly mean? Shall it describe the market strategy? Or does the question refer to the TRL– and thus to the time and effort needed to complete the project? Or to something else?
A: The full text in the template is: “Describe the impact on the DigiPrime ecosystem with reference to the selected KPIs, the impact of the DigiPrime activities and related risks, the business potential and the go-to-market level”.
The applicant is requested to describe a synthetic market strategy (considering the limited number of characters available) by explaining the needs and trends of the reference market (business potential) and how the proposed service will be ready to be placed on the market to fully exploit its business potential (go to the market).
Q: Does the DigiPrime Open Calls fundings fall within the I4MS program?
A: No.
Q: The guide for evaluators in the Impact section, states “Impact on Digiprime risks ==> Are the technical challenges and barriers well identified?”
Is the text referring to technical challenges for implementing and deploying the solution in Digiprime? Or to something different?
A:The text “Are the technical challenges and barriers well identified?” refers to technical challenges and barriers for implementing and integrating the solution in the DigiPrime platform (it is strongly recommended to read the Annex 9).
Concerning AWUs
Q: What’s the difference between “employees” and “persons working for the enterprise who are subordinate to it and considered employees under national law”?
A: The second definition refers to specific kind of contract in some countries. You need to ask to a national consultant to know if any of your collaborateurs is in this position.
Q: Regarding the statement “partners engaging in a regular activity in the enterprise and benefiting from financial advantages from the enterprise”, does “partners” category include company stakeholders?
A: Yes.
Q: Regarding the statement “partners engaging in a regular activity in the enterprise and benefiting from financial advantages from the enterprise”, does “partners” category include external collaborators (e.g. professionals with independent VATs, or professionals having their own small company-studio) with a regular activity in the company (e.g. 1-2 year-long contracts)?
A: No.
Q: Can a substitute of a person that is going on maternity leave be accounted as AWU?
A: Yes.
Q: How should the costs for the application be broken down? How detailed do you expect the cost breakdown to be?
A: The table “Budget and costs justification” in the proposal supplement (Annex 4) should indicate the total amount of costs, for each partner involved, for “personnel”, “travels”, “equipment”, “other goods and services” and “subcontracting”. Indirect costs should be indicated as 25% of all the sum of the direct cost (without the eventual subcontracting ones).
The column for each partner must show only the total amount in Euro for each item; the row of each item should contain concise but adequate justifications of the costs exposed, considering that the maximum duration of the sub-project is six months:
– Justification for personnel cost should at least contain the total number of person-month needed to properly complete the sub-project.
– Justification of travel costs should contain the number of travels (local, national or in Europe) per person, if any.
– Equipment costs, if any, should be duly justified with a clear explanation on how the applicant needs to buy that specific equipment to perform the planned work; only the depreciation cost of such equipment can be exposed, calculated for a period lower than six months. Due to such a low depreciation period, it is recommended to insert equipment costs only together with a clear, reasonable and verifiable justification.
– Justification of other goods and services should indicate the goods/services the applicant needs to purchase: each good or service should have its own cost associated.
– Subcontracting of an entire project task, if any, should be duly justified accordingly to the project description and considering the subcontracting characteristics explained at page 146 of the H2020 Annotated Model of Grant Agreement , available at: https://ec.europa.eu/research/
Q (about Open Call Type A): It is possible to combine services: for example, to extract data from the Product Information Management service during the execution of the project or afterwards once the architecture of the proposed solution will be created?
A: The data from the platform can be read in general, for the specific Product Information Management service: the service doesn’t use the DigiPrime DB, it is based on custom made relational DB, but it is possible to interact with the service developers to require specific APIs for data gathering. It is possible therefore to retrieve the Product Information Management service data and process it in the proposed service, but the output must however be written into the DigiPrime database in turn. – The DigiPrime database is polymorphic, unrelated, a “noSQL” is the correct technical term. This aspect conditions the reading/writing of the service data to be developed right from the analysis of the data to be processed.
Q (about Open Call Type A): Proposals should be cross-cutting or should limit to one Pilot?
A: Proposals can be related to one or more pilots or cross-cutting, in any case they should provide an added value for the DigiPrime platform.
Q (about Open Call Type A): Does the platform currently have blockchain? It is desirable to include it?
A: The platform already has a blockchain acting as a “tracing” and supporting the smart contract/data channel agreement. Its further implementation is not foreseen by the Open Call.
Q (about Open Call Type A): Will the visual part of the service be hosted on DigiPrime or outside the platform?
A: The new service output display can be hosted on a specific frontend, as many of the current services have done. Such frontends must however be released inside DigiPrime, so they would not remain external to the platform. Another option is to use the rEuse frontend, which however acts more as a setup form than as a real frontend, therefore it is very limited in data visualization, graphs, tables, etc.
Q (about Open Call Type A): How will the tests and pilots during the project execution will be placed? Will there be engagement from DigiPrime platform within their ecosystem to test our service during the execution of the call?
A: The platform tests are allowed only after the release and integration of the single service. Once integrated, they will use the complete platform published on the web to check for any corrections and/or proper behavior of their service. There is no direct access to the machine in SSH, and therefore a new versioned release must be developed at each code fix. All previously released versions will not be deleted, for tracking and history of partner activities.
Q (about Open Call Type A): It is expected to have a fully deployed service (TRL 9) or what is the expected/desired TRL by the end of the 6-month project?
A: The TRL 9, ready to go to the market, is not mandatory, but DigiPrime is expecting something that can be tested in a real environment, by the DigiPrime Pilots or by external stakeholders.
Q (about Open Call Type A): As the open call closes on 18th of July and the proposals review is expected to take 2 – 3 weeks we can assume to start the project by the beginning of September or it will be later?
A: The projects are supposed to start on 15 October.
Q (about Open Call Type A): the project will be funded at 70% for each beneficiary or participant, but with a maximum of €100,000. This would mean that if the total cost of the subproject is 100,000 €, 70,000 € will be funded. Or in another example – if the total cost is 142.000 €, 100.000 € will be funded. So the remaining 30% must always be financed by the applying company. Is this to be understood correctly?
A: €100K is the maximum contribution, so the total project cost for this contribution is €143K. The total cost could be highier, but you can not receive more then €100K.
For further information: info.opencalls@digiprime.eu
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, DT-ICT-07-2018-2019 “Digital Manufacturing Platforms for Connected Smart Factories” topic, under Grant Agreement ID 873111