ACTPHAST 4.0

ACTPHAST provides access to photonics innovation support driven by the business needs of European companies. The access centre to photonics experts and infrastructure will be created by co-ordinating and integrating the resources of more than 20 advanced facilities in Europe.

Photonics holds tremendous potential to enable disruptive product innovation and market success. More than 5000 companies in Europe, mainly SME’s, are involved in photonics-related industrial activities. However, many of these companies experience substantial barriers and roadblocks in trying to fully exploit the potential of photonics as the dedicated technologies and expertise are not always accessible or available.

ACTPHAST is a European centre that has emerged from the successful EU-funded project ACTMOST (see http://www.actphast.eu// ). The strategic mission of ACTPHAST is to considerably lower and even remove the photonics innovation barriers for SMEs which will enable start-ups and established companies to more easily and rapidly adopt and deploy photonics technologies in innovative products, helping to “cross the chasm” of new product development and accelerate time-to-market, and as such significantly stimulate company growth both in terms of market share and employment. As a unique single-source solutions provider, ACTPHAST provides access to photonics innovation support driven by the business needs of European companies. The access centre to photonics experts and infrastructure will be created by co-ordinating and integrating the resources of more than 20 advanced facilities in Europe that have a proven track-record in collaborative photonics development and innovation with European industry.

To lower the innovation barrier for companies even more, ACTPHAST 4.0 support is heavily subsidized for projects undertaken with SMEs (100% subsidy for the first 30K€ of costs for an innovation project and 75% subsidy for all project costs over 30K€ including follow-on projects with the same company. For large-scale companies, the subsidy is 50% on all project costs).