BEYOND Center of Excellence has also competences in Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and other procurement schemes in the GEO domain, in which among many assignments it gathers, analyzes and evaluates needs from the demand side (e.g. Public Authorities) and formalize them into requirements (e.g. set of use cases, Functional and not Functional requirements, metrics etc.). Hence, the main objective is to procure the development of those requirements and in parallel to safeguard incremental or radical innovation in the relevant domain (e.g. Marine, Civil Protection), by leveraging on existing Copernicus Services and other products from the Copernicus portfolio (e.g. raw data, DWH etc.).
In Horizon 2020, the EC wanted to simplify the list of possible types of actions, and so the various collaborative project actions have been reduced to two major types: 'Innovation actions' and 'Research and Innovation actions' (R&I).
The Innovation actions primarily consist of activities directly aiming at producing plans and arrangements or designs for new, altered or improved products, processes or services. They may include prototyping, testing, demonstrating, piloting, large-scale product validation and market replication