Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum (SEZ)

The Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum of Steinbeis Innovation gGmbH belongs to Steinbeis Foundation for Economic Promotion. The Foundation runs approximately 600 so-called Technology Transfer Centres mainly in Baden-Württemberg, but also in other regions in Germany and Europe. The Technology Transfer Centres are mostly attached to research organisations in order to guarantee close connection between R&D and industry. More than 3,000 researchers, consultants and engineers carry out more than 20,000 contracts per year to improve strategy, product and process development of companies.
SEZ was founded in March 1990. Since 2008 it has been a member of the regional European Enterprise Network (EEN) consortia. SEZ is also official National Contact Point (NCP) for SMEs in the region of Baden-Württemberg. The core activities of Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum are:

• Assist organisations to participate in European R&D projects,
• Support the management of international research projects,
• Give assistance in the exploitation of the research results,
• Promote transnational technology transfer
• Stimulate and support the innovation process in industrial companies
• Provide professional training.

SEZ has also gained considerable experience in organising workshops, conferences and brokerage events for technology transfer as well as finding partners for RTD-proposals. SEZ has been involved in more than 40 European projects in the last years, a number of them connected to the CRAFT/R4SME projects, thus ensuring a very good knowledge of SMEs in the State of Baden-Württemberg.

Contribution to MobyPost:

SEZ provides its broad experience on 3 main axes: technology transfer, dissemination and exploitation of project results, as well as project management.
Firstly, thanks to more than 20 years of activity in the field of European project management, SEZ provides support and assistance not only to the coordinator, but also to all project partners, for all issues related to administrative and financial management of the project. In addition, SEZ takes care of the good project communication and knowledge management.
Secondly, SEZ coordinates the project's dissemination and exploitation activities. This is achieved by defining a dissemination strategy for press releases, participation at conferences and fairs, etc., as well as a good management of the Intellectual Property Rights inside and outside the consortium. This also leads to implement concrete technology watch activities in order to prepare the future exploitation of project's results and to show the economical viability of the MobyPost concept. Finally, SEZ will be involved in the activities aiming at preparing the knowledge transfer for the larger exploitation of results, e.g by other sites of La Poste or by companies holding out similar applications. The main aspect here will be to present project achievements to municipalities, other European post delivery companies, etc., and convince them of the potential of the project outcomes.