ICT-2016 Call Results – Avanti tutta e a testa bassa

As all ICT players who submitted proposals last April to the ICT-2016 Call, on the 28th July we received via the Participant Portal official news from the European Commission about our submissions. For Martel this was a magic year: we won 4 projects between January to March. The 28th July outcomes confirmed magic goes on: 6 proposals over 12 accepted in ICT-2016 Call.

ICT-2016 Call Results

“Now it’s time to work even harder, stay concentrated, continue delivering excellence and ensure sustainability of our work and efforts. In Italian I’d say: avanti tutta e a testa bassa!” answered Dr. Monique Calisti, Executive Director and Partner of Martel Innovate, when asked by some partners if she was happy about the ICT 2016 outcomes.

“Of course I’m happy, I love my job, I have the best colleagues in the world and the network of our European and international partners is simply amazing. I feel honoured and blessed to have such a chance. All Martel colleagues are fully committed to the new challenges ahead. We’ll continue working hard, possibly even harder.” added Dr. Calisti.

Being a small team, back in December 2015 / beginning of January 2016, when defining our goal and objectives for this year, we decided to focus our efforts and concentrate our energy to work on less proposals than in 2015. We’ve been invited in more consortia than the ones we accepted to be part of and we took the initiative of leading just a couple. We worked hard, we worked with people we trust and that trust us, we tried to give our best, without neglecting any detail, not even formatting or graphical aspects. We knew competition will be incredibly hard.

Indeed, competition in H2020 has increased enormously. With the new cost models the number of competiting proposals, especially in some domains such as IoT, Cloud Computing and Big Data, has simply exploded. Excellent proposals with a score of 14 over 15, are at the top of the ranking, but still not in the funding zone.

ICT players in Europe are asked to excel and even that is not enough. There is always a certain portion of luck and magic, which randomly turns around.

This has been a very good year for us, at least until now. We are happy we will be able to work with a number of top innovators in Europe and all around the globe. Our team is growing and we will announce new openings by the end of Summer.

For now, the whole Martel team would like to express its gratitude and thank all partners that will continue to share upcoming challenges, opportunities and adventures with us!

Stay tuned, more to come…