FFPlus Europe - Business Experiments

This announcement is the second call for proposals to address the uptake of HPC by SMEs in order to solve specific business challenges of SMEs that have had no prior use of, or experience with, HPC services. The resulting sub-projects will perform “business experiments” (also referred just as experiments) that should demonstrate to the broader European SME ecosystem that HPC uptake solves business challenges and leads to positive business impact through the use and deployment of HPC-based computational methods. Thus, their key outputs are success stories that promote, communicate, and disseminate the business impact of HPC uptake to the SME ecosystem. Proposals are sought that address business challenges from European SMEs from varied application domains, whereby SMEs whose adoption of advanced HPC services will create the highest business impact will be prioritized. SMEs with an academic focus,or activities with a potential impact only in the long term are not within the scope of the call. This FFplus call is complementary to the open call for proposals for the Development of Generative AI Models (Identifier FFplus_Call-2-Type-2). It should be noted that SMEs, with the role of main participant, may only participate in one of the two types of sub-projects; i.e. participation is mutually exclusive. KEY CALL DETAILS Submission Deadline: August 26th, 2025 at 17:00 Brussels local time Expected duration of experiments: maximum 15 months with targeted commencement January 1st, 2026 The indicative total funding budget for all sub-projects funded under this call is € 4M. A number of funding constraints and eligibility conditions apply, which are detailed in the full announcement text. Proposals that do not adhere to these conditions will be rejected without further evaluation. Expectations for the experiments and for proposals The expectations for the proposed experiments are detailed in the full announcement text, a summary of which is as follows: Be fully aligned with the FFplus call objectives Define the business challenge and the need for HPC to address it. Present the positive business impact to be achieved by solving the challenge. Define specific objectives that must be achieved. Explain the inclusion of all parties required for the effective and efficient execution of the experiment and the demonstration of the impact on SME business challenges through the use of HPC systems or advanced HPC services. Define the resources needed to meet objectives and the associated costs. Address any data protection issues that might impact the proposed work plan. Support the FFplus project in the generation of publishable success stories which discuss how the SME’s real-world problems were addressed and clearly identify the business benefits realised or obtained. Be complementary to past Fortissimo experiments. The complete announcement and proposer’s guide for the current open call can be downloaded as a document "Announcement and Proposer’s Guide" here. https://www.ffplus-project.eu/file/1616182142749803_ffplus-call-2_type-1-announcement---proposers-guide-20250603.pdf