On 12th ? 13th of December, SECPhO participated at Invest in Photonics 2012 event in Bordeaux, France. This was a high level business promotion event withspeakers from Samsung, Alcatel, Zeiss, venture capitalists from around the world and other players in photonics business. During the event, new innovative companies participated in elevator pitches, where they had a chance to present their innovative photonics product and meet possible investors.

SECPhO participated as a partner association of French cluster Route des Lasers who organized the event. The event was a good possibility of meeting French colleagues to discuss and negotiate about the EPCNET project that SECPhO collaborates in project proposal writing together with other 7 clusters from Europe. This is an FP7 Coordination and Support Actions project proposal, directed towards international collaboration and access to different technology platforms for SMEs in European photonics innovation clusters. The proposal call ends on 16th of April, 2013 and a significant amount of work has been already done on that.

Another aim of attending the event was to get to know better about the concept of investment promotion event in photonics. SECPhO’s near future plans include an organization of similar meetings in Spain in order to help Spanish SMEs and startups to find possible investors.

Finally, an interesting offer from ePIXfab project representatives from IMEC technology platform in Belgium was received while networking. ePIXfab offers free feasibility studies and different affordable courses for European SMEs working with silicon photonics. For more information one should refer to www.epixfab.eu website or send an email to info@epixfab.eu. Similar services for SMEs in micro-photonics area are offered by the ACTmost project: www.actmost.eu. SECPhO invites related SMEs to use the services for free offered to compete better in Photonics field.