EMPHASIS has been created to help SMEs and start-up to implement the concept and philosophy of open innovation, not only to sustain their business, but also to benefit from a Euro-Mediterranean network, both entrepreneurial and knowledge-based.

With this goal, the project has selected four companies per country (total of twenty-four companies), which will benefit from innovation support services that will increase their capacities to innovate. And their readiness to engage with partners from the other countries by building cross-border partnerships.

This network will help them to expand into new markets and facilitate the exchange of knowledge between the different actors, so that this cooperation translates into the co-creation and commercialization of sustainable products and services and innovations of Euro-Mediterranean SMEs.

In this regard, the Association of Mediterranean Chambers of Commerce and Industry - ASCAME, based in Spain and partner of the project, selected 4 Spanish SMEs on the basis of their capacities to engage with the Open Innovation (OI) ecosystem, in order to provide them advisory services - in the form of vouchers - to enhance their innovation capacity to build partnerships, covering the different stages of their innovation journeys.

The Spanish SMEs selected sectors varied from Tourism, Cultural & Creative Industries to Agri-food, based in different cities from Spain:

• NAX Solutions S.L. – Alicante, Spain

NAX Solutions is a company platform that can tell the farmer where he must apply more water, add more fertilizer, where there is more anomaly, etc., specializing solely in satellite imagery processing and artificial intelligence that tailors each project to suit each individual project. With a focus on lowering costs and increasing productivity.

• Graniot Satellite Technologies – Granada, Spain

Graniot seeks to bring together high-value information in the agricultural sector for stakeholders involved in production decision-making, on a single web platform and at an accessible price. The company gets information from satellite data, meteorological and other sources from both public and private institutions, processes them independently and presents them in a multi-platform web application, designed with a simple, practical and intuitive user interface where to collect individualised information per plot.

• BRIOAGRO TECH S.L. – Sevilla, Spain

BrioAgro is a smart irrigation startup, which has developed a system that irrigates just when the plant needs it, thus achieving water savings of between 20% and 50% depending on the type of crop, while also improving the volume and quality of production. These water savings are accompanied by a reduction in energy costs for irrigation pumping, fertilizers, phytosanitary products and irrigation labor.

• Discoolverworld S.L., Valencia, Spain

Discoolverworld is a software that democratize the use of excellent tools to digitalize, communicate and sell the best assets of a destination, in an easy, professional an affordable manner. It is a solution in order to help destinations, tourists and also the products and services of the region to provide an excellent concierge service to their clients. They integrate their software into the existing platforms in order to adapt their capacities to their digital strategy, helping them in all the process and adding value to the destination and their local business and services.

The EMPHASIS project is committed to assisting SMEs and start-ups in implementing the concept and philosophy of open innovation, which in turn will help them to sustain their business, expand into new markets and commercialize sustainable products and services and the work of ASCAME in identifying and advising these Spanish SMEs is a crucial step toward accomplishing this aim.