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4C presents to European Commission workshops for COVID-19 innovation and recovery

4C joins European Commission planning workshops on COVID-19 innovation and recovery, with a focus on the European Aerospace and Defence Ecosystem.

As part of the European Commission’s planning for Covid-19 innovation and recovery, Director-General for Defence Industry and Space, Timo Pesonen has organised a series of workshops to better understand the impact of the pandemic on European Aerospace and the Defence eco-system.  Along with many representatives from European companies, research institutes and academia, 4C Strategies Founder and Chairman, Andreas Hedskog, participated in the first of these workshops.  Following the workshop, he had the following reflections:

“Undoubtedly, in the long term, there will be an increase in requirement on readiness and crisis management capabilities; however, there is a significant risk of short and medium term financial constraints as a result of COVID-19 which will limit the necessary R&D investments which are needed now.  This will be more acute for small and medium sized enterprises who traditionally have limited access to Government and EU R&D support.  This will be further compounded by travel restrictions creating difficulties to form large cross-border consortiums that are more often promoted through current defence capability financial instruments within the EU. Additionally, the promotion of large scale cooperation already comes at the expense of innovation as SMEs are often forced to play a smaller role in the supply chain of large defence contractors, accepting the terms and conditions of the big corporates.”

Andreas Hedskog, Founder & Chairman at 4C Strategies

“Therefore, our message to the European Commission is to request that there are R&D calls for consortia formed solely by SMEs – this would ensure that the innovative and competitive power of the SME community would directly provide the best value to European tax payers, especially in the realms of Defence, where the market has huge barriers to entry and scale already at the outset.”

4C Strategies COVID-19 Support

4C Strategies COVID-19 Support

As coronavirus-related needs and demands continue to evolve, 4C Strategies is offering specific pandemic support for our clients and wider network. This includes advisory services such as mid-incident COVID-19 reviews, additional operational resources (onsite or virtual) for risk, business continuity and crisis managers, and pre-configured software solutions to securely track, verify and visualise response efforts.

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