INFOPOLE Cluster TIC The Walloon network of digital stakeholders at the service of innovation

With 130 ICT professionals (companies, 90% of which are SMEs, universities, research centres and competence centres), INFOPOLE promotes business and innovation through partnerships. Since 2016, its activities have generated turnover of over €2,750,00 for its members and supported twenty or so projects of competitiveness clusters involving them.

INFOPOLE has tree main missions: to bring together the digital sector through partnerships; accelerate economic development through digitalisation and boost digital innovation across all disciplines with the competitiveness clusters. To achieve this goal, the cluster team implements various activities such as high-level technological conferences, workshops on issues encountered by companies active in the sector, workshops for raising awareness of digitalisation and digital tools, intersectoral meetings with competitiveness clusters, and industrial company visits.

INFOPOLE members have developed state-of-the-art expertise (cloud/ERP, data analytics & big data, artificial intelligence (AI)/ machine learning, digital simulation and prototyping, robotics, embedded systems, cyber security, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of Things, software and applications development) that is applied in sectors as diverse as manufacturing and mechanical engineering, health, aeronautics and space, transport and logistics, agro-industry, energy, environmental technologies, construction, plastics processing and photonics.

In 2019, INFOPOLE launched the Digital Innovation project in close collaboration with the competitiveness clusters and the support of Digital Wallonia. This programme aimed at the ideation and acceleration of the digital dimension in calls for projects will comprise 3 phases: intersectoral meetings with the clusters, collection of project ideas, and guiding these ideas toward a call for cluster projects or other solutions such as funding by DGO6, calls for European projects etc. In addition, the programme partners have implemented activities around 11 powerful themes (IA, data analytics, the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality etc.) to increase the participation of digital stakeholders in innovation projects and collaborate with industrial stakeholders on the development of innovative technological solutions 1 .

“DigitalWallonia4.ia”, another tool to stimulate innovation, promoted by the Agence du Numérique, Agoria, INFOPOLE and the AI network, aims at accelerating the adoption of IA in Wallonia around 4 main pillars: society, businesses, competences and the network. Two business support programmes were launched in November 2019: “START IA” to identify opportunities to develop IA solutions, and “TREMPLIN IA” for the elaboration of proofs of concept (PoCs) 2 .

In addition, INFOPOLE is a partner of DIGI-B-CUBE, a European project (H2020) aimed at encouraging the development of prototypes for a specific digitalisation challenge encountered by health, biopharmaceuticals and biotechnology stakeholders. The project will support consortia of 3 SMEs in at least 2 different

1 https://www.digitalwallonia.be/fr/projets/innovation-numerique 2 https://www.digitalwallonia.be/fr/projets/digitalwallonia4-ai 3 https://digibcube.eu/

sectors which together address a specific barrier to innovation in the value chain of Medical Diagnostics 3 . A call for projects will be launched in April 2020.

Through involvement in these various projects, the cluster contributes to addressing challenges such as the growth in size and skills of digital companies, strengthening the links between research and companies, accelerating the speed of marketing for research results, and raising the awareness of companies regarding the potential of digitalisation and new business models. Now that's what we call a broad programme!

INFOPOLE Cluster TIC asbl Rue Camille Hubert, 2/5 - Atrium Crealys B-5032 Gembloux Tel.: +32 (0) 471 95 76 78 E-mail: infopole@infopole.be