FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

The term “project” refers to the EU funded H2020 project KITT4SME (Grant agreement Nr. 952119).

The term “proposal” refers to the application document submitted to the KITT4SME’s open calls via the “Proposal Submission System”.

The term “action” refers to the activities in the proposals which are found eligible for grant allocation and funded upon the signature of the cascade funding contract.

KITT4SME proposes two rounds of open calls.

The goal of the first round of open calls (Type-A) for the KITT4SME project went to financial support to third parties for the development of AI-solutions in the broader spectrum of the topic ‘AI for manufacturing’ and their integration into the KITT4SME platform and the registration to the RAMP Marketplace.

We are currently in of the second part of the project open calls (Type-B) is foreseen in the and will invite small Consortia (teams of partners: approx. 2-3), which include at least one solution provider and at least one manufacturing end-user.

The Type-B open calls will be closed on 6th of September of 2022.

Unfortunately no, it is considered a Conflict of Interest as it could be unfair towards other applicants.

No.

This Open Call is open only to small teams (at least 2, maximum 3 entities) that are composed of:

• SMEs (see definition of SME according to the Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC) and mid-caps that develop software applications with a background in Artificial Intelligence (at least one entity as member of the team) and
• SMEs and mid-caps that are members of the manufacturing industry and involved in discrete manufacturing, as defined by the NACE Codes C14-C16 and C25-C32 under https://ati.ec.europa.eu/sectors/discrete-manufacturing (at least one entity as member of the team).

Entities should be legally established in the H2020 eligible countries, should not have been declared bankrupt or have initiated bankruptcy procedures, and the organisations (legal representatives) applying should not have convictions for fraudulent behaviour, other financial irregularities, and unethical or illegal business practices.

Please be reminded that the maximum amount of grant that a beneficiary can receive from SAE and I4MS Initiatives is limited with EUR 100 000. For more information, please refer to the Guide for Applicants (Type-B) Section 3.5.

Applicants are invited to apply by submitting a complete proposal following the template and guidelines available on the KITT4SME website. The proposal has to be submitted on the “Proposal Submission System” available at this link by the 6^th September 2022, 17:00 CEST.

One person from the KITT4SME project will be assigned as ‘mentor’ to each funded action. This person will act as the first point of contact between the third party executing the action and KITT4SME and will be responsible for:

• coordinating with the team representative of the action and communicate any information to the project management bodies as needed;
• facilitating the interaction between the action’s team and the project–related activities, like for example the organization of the validation phase and the integration into the KITT4SME platform;
• requesting, collecting and evaluating the quality of the expected deliverables.

FIWARE is an open-source initiative defining a universal set of standards for context data management which facilitate the development of Smart Solutions for different domains such as Smart Cities, Smart Industry, Smart Agrifood, and Smart Energy. The KITT4SME architecture uses the FIWARE Context Broker as part of the data management mechanism. Your interaction with FIWARE (where appropriate) is considered to be part of the integration activities.

Applicants should demonstrate that their solution can be easily integrated into the KITT4SME platform. Ideally, the solution should comprise RESTful services which are made available through Docker images and can be deployed to the KITT4SME service mesh by means of Kubernetes resource descriptors. Solutions featuring services with the aforementioned characteristics will be preferred. However, solutions grounded on different technical choices may be considered too depending on the required integration effort and value to the platform. The technical integration will be carried out with the contribution from technical partners from KITT4SME during action implementation.

RAMP stands for “Robotics and Automation Marketplace” and it is an open platform for manufacturing end-users and solutions’ providers, offering dynamic networking and interaction functionalities between the users. It is being supported by 5 projects and more than 30 DIHs and offers unique opportunities for exposure. RAMP is part of the KITT4SME platform and the solutions incorporated into the KITT4SME platform will be invited to be registered to RAMP as well (at least for the duration of the project).

It means that the solution has been validated in a “real-life” (preferably industrial) setting. Technology Readiness Level of 5 or above is the baseline mandatory requirement for participating in KITT4SME’s Type-A open calls. During the submission phase, applicants are asked to provide evidence of the maturity level of the proposed solution. More information are available in the Guide for Applicants.

The payments will be made in lump sum form in 3 instalments. An advance payment will be provided to start. The KITT4SME project and experiments contracts foresee an internal review process for all submitted deliverables. Approval of the deliverables is necessary for any intermediate or final payment. Failure in achieving deliverables approval may result in no further payments be released.

Yes, remember that the details to perform the validation has to be provided in the validation description. In terms of funds, since these are provided as lump sum, actions can spend them as they wish as long as the expenditure contributes to the success of the action.

The ownership of all IPR created by the third parties within the actions via the KITT4SME funding will remain with them.

Proposals should provide a good balance of ambition and effort. They should be realistic. This aspect will be evaluated as well during the proposal selection process. In any case, no additional funding beyond the proposed and contracted budget will be provided to third parties involved in the action.

There is the possibility to reasonably change the action plan as long as this is fully justified. The rules of H2020 projects apply here as well.

Funding mainly addresses personnel, expenses, as well as travel and subsistence. Please remember that the KITT4SME Open Calls are Cascade Funding for Horizon 2020 projects. In this sense, the criteria for eligibility of costs as mentioned in this Financial Guide (https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=15128&langId=en) apply. Keep in mind that although the grants are given in lump sum, EU Authorities may audit you in the future.

The general criteria for the eligibility of costs, as outlined in Section 4.2 of the previous EU Financial Guide are:

“In order to be eligible for EU funding, costs must meet the following criteria:

1. be incurred by the beneficiary during the duration of the action, with the exception of costs relating to final reports and audit certificates;
2. be indicated in the estimated overall budget of the action attached to the grant agreement;
3. be necessary for the implementation of the action which is the subject of the grant;
4. be identifiable and verifiable, in particular being recorded in the accounting records of the beneficiary and determined according to the applicable accounting standards of the country where the beneficiary is/are established and according to the usual cost-accounting practices of the beneficiary;
5. comply with the requirements of applicable tax and social legislation;
6. be reasonable, justified and comply with the principle of sound financial management, in particular regarding economy and efficiency.

If applicable under the call for proposals, costs incurred by entities affiliated to a beneficiary will be eligible provided:

• the concerned entities are identified in the grant agreement
• they abide by the rules applicable to the beneficiary under the grant agreement with regard to eligibility of costs and rights of audits by the Commission, the European Anti-Fraud Office and the Court of Auditors.

Value added tax (VAT) is considered as eligible13 where it is not recoverable under the applicable national VAT legislation and is paid by a beneficiary other than a non-taxable person as defined in the first subparagraph of Article 13(1) of Directive 2006/112/EC14 on the common system of value added tax.

If VAT is not eligible in view of the nature of all or part of the activities funded by a specific call for proposals, it will be clearly announced in the text of the call.

The successful applicant/s must take care to avoid any unnecessary or unnecessarily high expenditure.

The beneficiary’s internal accounting and auditing procedures must permit a direct reconciliation of the costs and revenue declared in respect of the action with the corresponding accounting statements and supporting documents.

Documentation justifying costs must be kept by the beneficiary for five years following the Commission’s final payment.”

We comply with the definition of Small Medium Enterprises SMEs and Medium Capitalization Enterprise as given by the EC:

Small Medium Enterprise: Medium Enterprise ( <250 staff headcount and (turnover <= 50Μ€ or balance sheet total <= 43Μ€) ) a description of the conditions and the autonomy requirements for the company is given in the Commission Recommendation 2003/361/E (accessible here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32003H0361 ); Small and Micro enterprises have lower limits and are eligible in the KITT4SME Open Calls as well (see above Commission Recommendation for the actual numbers).

Medium Capitalization Enterprise: Any enterprise, other than an SME, with up to 3,000 employees measured on a full time equivalent basis and complying with autonomy requirements as further described in the Commission Recommendation 2003/361/E https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32003H0361

All third parties (individual legal entities) have a maximum limit of EUR 100,000.00 to be received as Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) in Smart Anything Everywhere (SAE) and ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) initiatives.

We consider that the areas under the NACE codes C14-C16 and C25-C32 (see this link) cover the majority of the cases of discrete manufacturing. If you think that your application (Use Case) still falls under the area of ‘discrete manufacturing’ and is not covered by these NACE codes, you are invited to send us a request to get a pre-approval via the Abstract Submission System. Note that this pre-approval is a mandatory step if your Use Case is not under these NACE Codes (see section 3.5.1 in our Guide for Applicants). It is not needed for applications that have Use Cases that can directly reference one or more of the NACE codes in the above.