The South3E consortium hosted a hybrid project meeting on 21st July 2023 at Labs Lisboa incubator space, after wrapping up the first editions of the S3E Charge and S3E Start programmes.
The HiSeedTech team welcomed representatives from International Development Ireland and Australo in the beautiful city of Lisbon, while the Institute for Sustainable Development at EPLO team joined online from Greece.
After hosting two very successful Open Days this summer, where the selected startups and research teams from Southern Europe presented their deep tech solutions, the consortium took this meeting as an opportunity to celebrate the successes of the first S3E cohorts, and to reflect on the lessons learned since the launch of the project in September 2022.
Our achievements so far… (in a nutshell)
Since announcing our first Open Call for the three South3E tracks — Charge, Start and Reverse* — in November 2023, we have provided online training, webinars, mentoring and one-to-one support to and (working in collaboration with various TTOs) from 7 countries, including: Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Romania and Turkey.
And, overall, we have engaged with 500+ representatives and stakeholders from across the entire European entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems, through online and in-person informative sessions, events, conferences and project roadshows.
What’s next for South3E?
The joint hybrid meeting proved to be a perfect occasion for exchanging different perspectives on what has made S3E successful during its first year, but it also provided a safe space to discuss some of the challenges we have encountered along the way so far.
In the next months, all four partners will be working together to prepare the launch of the second Open Call to welcome a new cohort of SMEs, startups, researchers and TTOs into the S3E programme in 2024. We will be doing things a bit differently this time, taking into account the valuable feedback we have received from those who participated in the programme this year, but the energy and the enthusiasm levels remain the same (or even higher!) as when we were preparing to launch South3E and our first open call back in 2022.
We can’t give away too many details yet, as the engines are running in the background while we finalise all the details for our next open call, but for those who may be interested in applying to join one of the S3E tracks, we can tell you one thing… keep an eye out for the announcement coming out in September! Remember to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter, and subscribe to our .
We look forward to continuing unlocking the innovation potential of Southern European deep tech 🚀
* The S3E Reverse programme is still active and we will soon share more details about the corporates and the SMEs selected, and the challenges they’re tackling through their deep tech innovations.