For CELTIC-NEXT, 2021 was a year of renewal and change. 2022 and 2023 were two important years of implementation and analysis. Let’s have a look together to what has been achieved to date, and what we plan for 2024 & 2025.

Progress on Implementing the Roadmap

Since 2022, we have pursued the implementation of CELTIC’s new roadmap by running several actions. We incorporated this roadmap in our Launch Events and Proposers’ Brokerage Days, to allow consortia to propose innovative projects in the large number of fields of technologies, applications, and verticals of the new roadmap. This is our traditional bottom-up approach. We will continue to run our Spring and Autumn Calls as per our successful legacy. This is a unique selling point of CELTIC as a Eureka Cluster compared to other international funding schemes. And it will remain so in the future.

Working on the Partnerships

We signed two major partnerships (with ESA and with 6G-IA-SNS) to enhance our funding impact in the global ICT community, as well as in other industries. Those partnerships will nourish further our roadmap and attractiveness to Public Authorities to fund impactful innovative projects across and beyond the Eureka and European (contracted form: Eurekan) countries. The targets of those partnerships are: knowledge exchange & SRIAs cross-contributions; leveraging funding schemes across Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) & topics; calls timing alignment & Easier pipelining of proposals; from Research to Market (TRL 7, early adopters, testbeds…); offering innovative entities the full panel between top-down programs and bottom-up spaces for their collaborative projects.

CELTIC-NEXT director Xavier Priem presented the CELTIC-NEXT Eureka CLUSTER
advantages and proposal support at the 5G Techritory in a 6G-SNS ICE co-creation workshop on National initiatives.

Running Calls

At the time of publication of this edition of the CELTIC-NEXT’s News, the Spring Call 2024 will have ended. Therefore, it is already time to announce the Autumn Call 2024! The Autumn Call 2024 will be launched on the 28th of May 2024 with an online event. The Proposers’ Brokerage Day will take place on the 5th of September 2024 in physical presence. The location will be announced via our Newsletter and our Web site. The submission will close on the 21st of October 2024, for a labelling early December 2024. Forecasted possible start dates for labelled projects would be first half of 2025. We can also happily say that more countries support CELTIC-NEXT and that Sweden supports again our Autumn Calls.

Flagships

AINET is ending, time has come for a new flagship

AINET Flagship and its three vertical projects have been tremendous successes with a high impact on several fundamental KPIs. Those projects are about to end. A final Closure Event is programmed for the 2nd of July 2024, collocated with the 6G Conference Berlin. Please check the Events section of this CELTIC-NEXT News issue.

As we are writing those lines, a new large consortium has formed and is making the proposal of a new flagship proposal in the stream of SASER, SENDATE and AINET. More information will be shared if this proposal gets labelled during this summer. The CELTIC-NEXT office is happy to establish the contact between potential new partners interested in joining the flagship after its labelling. Please contact us at .

Designing the Space ICT flagship programme

Space ICT has become a subject of high attention for industry and governments, and this has been strongly reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. A clear sign has been also sent by 3GPP, which has now opened wider doors for the inclusion of SatCom besides the traditional backhauling role. The Memorandum of Intent will encourage terrestrial ICT and Space ICT industry collaboration with other industry verticals to facilitate the adoption of advanced Space ICT technologies in the business models and processes of all industry sectors. CELTIC-NEXT and ESA are working together to define a joint roadmap of technologies, use cases and agenda of calls. ESA is a key actor in the development of all aspects and fields of space activity. Once the first roadmap and calls agenda are ready, CELTIC and ESA will advertise those. The joint Roadmap and Agenda are being defined. The first CELTIC Space ICT flagship is under discussion with the Industry and the funding agencies and ministries.

Acquiring new Core Group memberships

The CELTIC-NEXT’s Director has the mandate from CELTIC-NEXT’s Core Group to propose and integrate new industry members to the existing Core Group. Some discussions are ongoing for some industrial companies.

ECP & Joint thematic calls

An analysis of the first results for the in 2021 initiated Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP) is currently ongoing. Target is to understand if the new structured collaborative approach grouping the five Eureka clusters under a Eureka Programme as such has achieved the goals it was assigned. Same applies to the first Joint Thematic Call on Sustainability. More will be reported once this analysis is finished.

No new Join Thematic Call bringing all Clusters together in a same call is foreseen as of today. Potential new more focused Joint Calls with CELTIC-NEXT, where a sub-group of clusters (2 to 3) would engage together, are under discussion. Once those calls are exhaustively defined, the CELTIC-NEXT office will advert them. Stay tuned by visiting ou Call Calendar page: https://www.celticnext.eu/call-calendar/ and/or by subscribing to our Newsletter under https://www.celticnext.eu/news-subscription/ .

Outlook

2024 is and will remain a challenging year for many topics. Joint collaborative innovation and knowledge exchange is one of the best weapons against obscurantism, pandemics and wars. Our ICT community is one of the best positioned to understand and support this. Cybersecurity, Resilience of Critical Infrastructures, Sustainability… are certainly topics to be fully supported by our ICT technologies and to be ranked now as absolute priorities in the new world that is in front of us. The new flagship proposal goes along those strategic lines.

2024 is also a year of joyful proud Celebration! CELTIC is getting 21 years old! This special Anniversary will be celebrated in Berlin on the 2nd of July 2024, during the 6G Berlin Conference, under the new presidency of Eureka by Germany and Canada. High Level Representatives from our Industry and from Ministries and Eureka’s new President will take the floor to share their support and enthusiasm about CELTIC across its history and for the coming years!

A detailed agenda will be shared soon. Stay tuned by visiting ou Call Calendar page: https://www.celticnext.eu/call-calendar/ and/or by subscribing to our Newsletter ­under https://www.celticnext.eu/news-subscription/.