Boosting the impact of EU funded research in the field of freight transport and logistics to support competitiveness and address the climate challenge

Freight transport and logistics are the backbone of our economy. During the unprecedented responses triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic time, the logistics sector once again demonstrated its vital importance, ranging from ensuring delivery of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) and vaccines to food for vulnerable groups. While facing significant disruptions from closed borders and lockdowns, the sector has shown great resilience and efficiency. The success of today’s logistics sector has benefited from decades of EU investments in research and innovation (R&I) advancing innovation in the logistics sector through various Framework Programmes, e.g. FP5 (1998-2002), FP6 (2002-2006), FP7 (2007-2013), and the ongoing HORIZON 2020 (2014 – 2020).

The BOOSTLOG project, commencing in 2021, is a 3 year project funded by the EU through HORIZON 2020, aiming to boost the impact generated from EU funded R&I projects to contribute to EU policy objectives, address societal challenges and increase EU’s competitiveness.

During the 3 year duration, the project will:

• systematically and logically summarise key results and outcomes from more than 160 EU funded R&I projects and make them available and accessible to a wide range of audiences;
• develop and implement a strategy to overcome barriers for deployment of EU funded R&I projects results, thus accelerating the innovation uptake by e.g. creating an Innovation Marketplace;
• identify and prioritise R&I gaps in logistics research for today’s and tomorrow’s needs to be addressed by funding programmes (e.g. Horizon Europe);
• facilitate knowledge exchange on best practices in R&I public funding in the logistics sector at regional, national, and European level;
• reach out and engage with more researchers and companies to participate in future R&I projects and valorise previous results.

The project consortium is led by the Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe, ALICE, and consists of 12 additional partners representing different stakeholders: R&D (ZLC, TKI DINALOG, ICCS, Fraunhofer IML and TU Delft), government (TKI DINALOG), Company (HACON, FIT, Fundación Valenciaport), Civil Society (Smart Freight Centre SFC) and Collaborative Networks and Clusters (VIL, CLOSER and ERTICO-ITS Europe).

The BOOSTLOG consortium will launch a series of awards to recognise the success of innovation implementations from EU funded R&I project outcomes and the innovation Pioneers. The awards will promote these cases broadly towards the different stakeholders group. The aim is to support the sector to develop and implement more innovative solutions and demonstrate benefits of EU funding to the sector innovation. The awards will be a great opportunity to showcase successful examples, thus  increasing governments R&I investment opportunities to create value for society.