What is this?

The Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership (SBEP) is a co-funded partnership under Horizon Europe, supporting ambitious and transnational research and development projects in the sector of maritime and marine technologies for blue growth. SBEP accelerates the transformation towards a climate neutral, sustainable, productive and competitive blue economy by 2030, and creates and supports the boundary conditions for a healthy ocean for mankind by 2050.

The partnership is active from 1 September 2022 up till 31 December 2029.

What is the composition of the consortium?

The partnership gathers 74 funding actors from 30 countries.

A SBEP project consortium consists of at least 3 independent partners from 3 different participating countries. For each country and region, specific eligibility criteria and funding rules apply. Before submission, it is required to contact the funding actors from every country and region from which funding is requested.

What funding programmes are involved?

VLAIO takes part with the programmes for industrial research and development projects.

The project proposals need to comply with the eligibility criteria of these programmes.

What is the process?

The evaluation of the proposals takes place in 2 stages. When participating in a project call, the coordinator of the international SBEP project should submit first a pre-proposal to SBEP by the prescribed deadline. The Flemish participants requesting funding from VLAIO should, by the same deadline, submit a funding request to VLAIO. After the eligibility check by the related funding actors and SBEP, the remaining project proposals are invited to submit a full proposal to SBEP for evaluation.

What is the target group?

The SBEP target group is wide and is generally aimed at companies and research organisations, envisioning to cooperate with foreign partners to conduct a challenging and high-risk R&D project. Flemish participants requesting funding from VLAIO should comply with the requirements of the funding programmes for industrial research and development projects. This requires participants to be a company with exploitation activities in Flanders, and which is capable to exploit the project results sufficiently.

More information?

bluepartnership.eu

Documents for submission

• Templates for submission to SBEP are available on bluepartnership.eu.
• For submission to VLAIO, please follow the procedures and documents of the chosen programme: either research and development projects. Do not forget to tick the box indicating your submission is in the framework of an international proposal, and to select SBEP as the European network!

Do you consider submission of a proposal to SBEP? It is mandatory to contact VLAIO (jozef.ghijselen@vlaio.be, +32 2 432 42 40) for further information and/or an exploratory meeting.