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The European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC) and the Eurochile Business Foundation, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), establishing a formal cooperation initiative between EARSC, responsible for promoting the use of Earth Observation (EO) technology and supporting companies in Europe which offer EO-related products and services, and Eurochile, responsible for promoting economic, trade, and technological cooperation between the private sector and institutions in Chile and the European Union, through business promotion, and the transfer of technology and know-how.

The MoU aligns perfectly with the objective of strengthening and deepening the working relations between the two entities in areas of mutual interests related to earth observation. EARSC and Eurochile strive to support in connecting European companies with Chilean companies with the aim of incentivising new opportunities for business, transfer of technology and innovation, and possible joint ventures or other collaboration mechanisms. This is particularly relevant given two key factors: (1) In February 2018, Eurochile was assigned the important task of representing in Chile the European Earth Observation Programme – Copernicus – as a member of the Copernicus Relay Network; and (2) In March 2018, the European Commission and the Chilean Government signed a Copernicus Cooperation Agreement to promote the programme in Chile.

“Eurochile is extremely pleased to formalize working relations with EARSC that opens up endless opportunities to work together, promoting the creation of new businesses in the field of space observation data within the framework of the Copernicus Programme”, Mr. Vicente Caruz, President of Eurochile said during the signing of the MoU at the Chilean Embassy in Brussels.

Mr. Geoff Sawyer, Secretary General of EARSC indicated that “we are delighted to sign this agreement with Eurochile following the Copernicus agreement signed between the European Commission and Chile. We consider that this opens excellent opportunities for European companies and those from Chile to work closely together”.

During the signing of the MoU, in the Embassy of Chile in Belgium, the Chilean Ambassador to the Kingdom of Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Mr. Raúl Fernández Daza, highlighted the fact that “this agreement will foster the practical use of massive amounts of multi-source data and quality information through applications and platforms that will be designed by private companies for the benefit of Chile and Europe, in vast numbers of critical fields, such as land, ocean, emergency response, atmosphere, civil security and climate change”.

About the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC)
EARSC is a non-profit organisation aimed to promote the use of Earth-observation (EO) and European companies which offer EO-related products and services. Formed in 1989, the organisation has over 100-member companies from throughout Europe with a secretariat office in Brussels. EARSC is actively involved in coordinating and strengthening the EO chain and promoting the European geoinformation industry, and also providing a unified voice on wider European and global issues of importance to the industrial sector.

For more information contact Marion Bouvet: marion.bouvet@earsc.org
Website: www.earsc.org
Twitter: @earsc
LinkedIn: EARSC

About the Eurochile Business Foundation

The Eurochile Business Foundation is a pioneering initiative of the European Union and the State of Chile, established in 1993 as a non-profit organization. Eurochile’s mission is to promote economic, trade and technological cooperation between the private sector and institutions in Chile and the European Union, through business promotion, technology and know-how transfer. The foundation is meant to serve as a bridge between Chile and the member countries of the European Union; a bridge for entrepreneurship, technology partnerships and good practice exchange. The concept of mutual benefit is nowadays a key concept in the relations between the European Union and Latin America.

For more information contact Nina Morales: nmorales@eurochile.cl
Website: www.eurochile.cl Twitter: @eurochile_
LinkedIn: Fundación Eurochile

Planet is expanding its engagement in Europe in a big way. Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Airbus, a leader in remote sensing, to enable access to each other’s data and joint cooperation on the development of new geospatial solutions.

François Lombard, Director of the Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space (left); Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space (center); and Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet (right) at the signing of the agreement at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France.

As part of the agreement, Planet and Airbus aim to provide customers with a comprehensive suite of global remote sensing data at multiple temporal and spatial resolutions, and to collaborate on new analytic solutions for a range of commercial markets.

Airbus and Planet are truly complementary partners in the sense that Airbus provides reliable, high-resolution remote sensing capabilities, and Planet brings its unique global coverage and temporal cadence, as well as rapid iteration. Together, both partners will be able to deliver new and sophisticated offerings to fit customer needs globally across markets.

“By combining our strengths, we will provide a key capability to address all market needs, both in terms of data and value-added products, and to best serve our clients, whatever their industry and their requirements” said François Lombard, Director of the Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space.

Airbus’s constellation is comprised of very high-resolution Pléiades 1A and 1B; the high-resolution SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 satellites and the DMC constellation. On the radar side, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, and the PAZ radar satellites ensure customers have access to any location whatever the cloud coverage. Planet operates the largest constellation of satellites in history, offering daily, global 3-5 meter resolution imagery via its over 130 PlanetScope satellites and sub-daily, sub-1 meter resolution imagery of anywhere on Earth with its constellation of 13 SkySats.

Looking ahead, Airbus and Planet can maximize their global presence in key verticals, while leveraging each other’s expertise to bring more comprehensive and advanced geospatial products to market. This partnership spans generations of aerospace innovation and reaches across borders, and Planet is looking forward to a bright future partnering with Airbus.

“Source:“https://www.planet.com/pulse/airbus-partnership-geospatial-solutions/

After 32 years of working for GAF and more than 11 years in the position of CEO, Peter Volk stepped down from the latter position as planned on 30 June 2018. On 1 July, Sebastian Carl took over as CEO of GAF.

J.M. Gardin (Deputy CEO Telespazio and CEO Telespazio France), J. Cuscianna (Head of HR Telespazio), S. Carl (CEO GAF AG), L. Pasquali (CEO Telespazio), M. Comparini (CEO e-GEOS)

Sebastian Carl has been with the company for more than 25 years and previously already managed large parts of the companies’ activities. With an educational background as an agricultural engineer, he gained a doctorate in SAR imagery analysis using artificial analysis. Among other things, he has worked with the analysis of large volumes of EO data at GAF.

Peter Volk will remain available to the company in order to ensure a smooth transition and assistance with strategic and operative functions. GAF is very pleased that it can provide management continuity and therefore ongoing excellent service to its existing and future clients.

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Earth-i was recently named the number one “new space” company in Europe; quite an achievement for a company only 3 years old.

Earth-i was set up as a major distributer of the DMC3/TripleSat Constellation data. Since then, Earth-i has added several constellations to their fleet of Earth Observation satellites, including their very own service demonstrator satellite, VividX2. The VividX2 service demonstrator satellite launched in January 2018, just 7 months after Earth-i announced their plans to launch the first Earth observation constellation of satellites to offer very high-resolution, full-colour video and still imagery. It’s been a busy time at Earth-i HQ in Guildford.

As Earth-i’s success story continues to proliferate through industry and government, they’ve been flying the flag for the UK space sector.

Firstly, Earth-i was selected by ESA’s Earth Observation programme team to record an address for the next Member States meeting in early 2019. Richard Blain, CEO, discussed ESA’s need to shake up how they work with commercial organisation and small businesses and continue positive initiatives such as EO Open Data Science and Phi Lab.

Last week, Earth-i was also delighted to host Member of Parliament for Guildford, Anne Milton, at their head office on the University of Surrey Research Park, joined by Sarah Parker, MD of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. The meeting was an opportunity for Anne to learn more about the growing Space Cluster on the Surrey Research Park, as well how each organisation is supporting the next generation of space sector employees.

By working together, the UK space sector is aiming to capture 10% of the global space market by 2030, worth an estimated £40 billion annually to the UK economy. According the latest figures, the sector is making excellent progress towards this goal by already securing a £14bn turnover, and growth of 71% by 2010.

Richard Blain recently sat down with Geospatial world to discuss openly how the UK and Europe are creating prime environments for new small businesses and start-ups in the space sector. Watch Richard’s interview with GeoSpatial world by visiting: “https://www.geospatialworld.net/videos/uk-has-a-conducive-environment-for-space-start-ups/”: https://www.geospatialworld.net/videos/uk-has-a-conducive-environment-for-space-start-ups/

Earth-i is a global business, working with clients across world, and the Guildford location is where Earth-i chose to center their HQ to take advantage of the space cluster and the world-leading expertise in space technology and innovation close at hand. UK Government departments have set up a very supportive environment and regularly find ourselves collaborating with new partners from across the space sector, as well as non-traditional ‘space data’ users, such as our new product development initiative with commodity market data specialists Marex Spectron.

As the company grows, there are new and exciting careers opportunities within the technology and product development team. Would you like to join the fastest growing sector in the UK? Take a look at our career pages to see our current opportunities.

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DRAXIS was founded in 2000 in Thessaloniki – Greece. During the early years, DRAXIS’s field of interest was the implementation of environmental studies and the provision of consulting services. Later on, and with a small dedicated group of experts, DRAXIS expanded into the environmental ICT sector; it was one of the first and few companies in Greece active in this domain.

Today, DRAXIS is a dynamic company that focuses on developing real life environmental and agricultural ICT solutions and providing specialized environmental consultation services. Passionate about applying ICT, DRAXIS uses, combines and integrates remote sensing technologies, compound algorithms, GIS and different data sources to build multi-functional web-based platforms and mobile applications, decision making tools, crowdsourcing platforms, workflow systems and other software solutions.

Leveraging its unique know-how and expertise on the environmental and agricultural sectors, DRAXIS anticipates market needs and develops state-of-the-art solutions for the private and public sectors at local, national and European levels. The solutions provided mainly target the fields of environment, agriculture, air quality, citizen science, weather forecasting, e-government.

Having an experienced diverse pool of professionals, DRAXIS puts a great deal of effort into its own research, so as to keep up with the latest scientific advances; this, coupled with its active involvement in European and National research projects, enables the company to develop solutions and services that help users to address challenges and customers to explore new business opportunities. The implementation of several research projects, brought into DRAXIS valuable experience, so in the last 5-8 years the company has created a new department and has entered the field of Earth Observation. As part of its expertise and involvement in R&D projects, DRAXIS delivers products and services that make use of EO data for the agricultural and the air quality sector.

A. Services for the Air Quality Sector
Air pollution is one of the major environmental challenges of the present age that poses threat to human health. Having years of expertise in this field, DRAXIS develops ICT solutions that help citizens, industries and governments to monitor and forecast the air pollution levels and tackle their negative impacts.

Envi4All

Envi4All is a service built by DRAXIS to provide direct access to targeted, localised, and easy –to-understand information on air quality (current, forecast, and historical), making use of diverse sources of large datasets of open data on air quality, including Earth Observation data. Envi4All is offered through a mobile application and an API service, while the forecast methodology was developed by DRAXIS using CAMS products, official air quality measurements and data from IoT sensors. Personalized recommendations and alerts for poor air quality conditions are providing to citizens according to their needs and sensitivities, while businesses can provide added value services by using and integrating the Envi4All forecast in their offerings.

AirQast

DRAXIS also participates in the Horizon2020 project AirQast that builds a self-sustainable platform providing air quality services based on Earth Observation data. The services that will be developed in the framework of the project include monthly updated regional emissions at 1km resolution using top-down observations, street level air quality maps taking into account the meteorological conditions and local emissions, advanced hourly air quality forecasts, and decision-making tools to manage air quality events. The AirQast project envisions building a one-stop portal platform containing tools and functionalities that facilitate and simplify the access, visualization and management of air quality data for commercial and policy purposes.

B. Services for Agriculture

Crop management is a quite difficult and continuing challenge for small and large farm holdings, agri-food companies and public agencies responsible for delivering the agricultural policy. DRAXIS uses its expertise both in the agricultural and the ICT sector and combines different technologies to develop software solutions and services that make farm management more efficient and the implementation of agricultural policy simpler. Today, DRAXIS coordinates two H2020 earth observation projects, APOLLO and RECAP, aiming to make the big step from providing geospatial services for the environmental sector to providing earth observation services for the agricultural sector.

Operational Crop Advisory Services

APOLLO is a commercial platform that provides a suite of EO based farm management advisory services designed to address the needs of small farmers, agricultural cooperatives and agricultural consultants. The core application is a web-based platform with GIS capabilities, which is accessible using all operating systems. The platform is complemented by a mobile application, designed to assist agricultural consultants to conduct tasks in the field related to the APOLLO platform.

ICT Solutions for the Common Agricultural Policy

RECAP is a commercial platform (cloud-based Software as a Service – provided as a web-based and mobile/tablet application) that integrates satellite remote sensing and user-generated data into added value services for farmers, public authorities and agricultural consultants. RECAP responds to the Common Agricultural Policy monitoring challenges, allowing a remote compliance control system for specific rules of Cross-Compliance and Greening, providing advanced manual and fully automatic hybrid Earth Observation (EO) techniques combined with user-generated data (geotagged and timestamped photos).

Following the successful implementation of a number of R&D National and European projects, the next steps for DRAXIS are to bring the developed solutions into the relevant markets and thrive. Additionally, the company aims in establishing fruitful synergies for new R&D projects and ideas, so as to extent its current market portfolio of EO powered applications to other sectors like water management, circular economy, waste and climate change mitigation.

“As the founder of the company and the CEO for almost 15 years I would urge other entrepreneurs to always keep a high standard in their work no matter how tight the projects are. Hard work and High quality in the final deliverables never failed anybody!” Evangelos Kosmidis (Founder of DRAXIS ENVIRONMENTAL SA)

“Website:“https://draxis.gr/

Deimos Imaging’s parent company, UrtheCast, announced on May 19th the signature of a credit agreement for US$142 Million to finance the construction, launch and deployment of the UrtheDaily™ Constellation. This important milestone brings the implementation of UrtheDaily™ one step closer.

UrtheDaily™ is a satellite constellation designed to acquire the whole Earth’s landmass, excluding Antarctica, every day at 10:30 am, with high-quality multispectral imagery at 5m resolution. It will facilitate geo-analytics at scale, achieving highly cost-effective, daily, global coverage, delivering scientific-grade quality data.

The mission has been developed with and for Deimos Imaging’s customers, including Land O ‘Lakes, who became anchor customers in February 2017. One of the main markets for UrtheDaily™ is Precision Agriculture by providing the foundational products to significantly accelerate decision making and optimize production, benefiting end users worldwide. The delivery of multi-band, spectral diverse data on a daily basis, will offer the opportunity to develop unique and responsive value-added applications, previously not possible for key markets such as Agriculture.

Deimos Imaging is leveraging over a decade of experience and unique expertise in supporting agriculture applications with their legacy Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 missions. They are currently improving this capability by launching the ‘UrtheDaily precursor service’, which is based on diversified multi-satellite imagery, bringing together various Earth Observation assets that result in increased observation frequency and coverage. The availability of the ‘UrtheDaily precursor service’ now, supports Deimos Imaging’s customer base and is expected to evolve successfully leading them to UrtheDaily™.

The spectral bands of the UrtheDaily™ Constellation are specifically selected to match bands of other missions (including Sentinel-2), to enable constant and automatic in-flight cross-calibration with trusted references, minimizing the atmospheric effects, and to provide improved accuracy. Therefore, any user worldwide could seamlessly integrate UrtheDaily™ into their critical workflows, accelerating reliable analytics.

Other markets that will benefit from the global coverage, daily revisit and geo-analytics ready imagery provided by UrtheDaily™, include Maritime Surveillance, Land Administration and Mapping, Emergency and Disaster Management, Forestry and Environment, Oil and Gas and Defence and Security. The products will be available directly onto users’ desktop in Near Real Time.

The European Union (EU) faces many challenges economically, socially, and environmentally. Location intelligence is a key element when it comes to making better decisions and formulating policy to create a stronger, more united, and connected digital Europe.

Program description

During this event, you will have the opportunity to share experiences and get inspired with best practices in applying GIS to a number of EU policies. We will do this through a series of policy-oriented plenary presentations on the 7th of November and more technical-oriented sessions on the 8th of November.

Register Now

We invite you to attend this free and invitation-only event. Please register to secure your seat and save the dates in your schedule. We will come back to you soon with more details on the speakers and the agenda.

NextGEOSS Beta Release
NextGEOSS is the European datahub and platform, providing access to EO data to the European users’ communities, together with Cloud resources, seamlessly connected to provide an integrated ecosystem for supporting applications contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). NextGEOSS is a contribution from Europe to GEO System of Systems (GEOSS).

The Crop Monitoring Supporting Food Security pilot was successfully integrated in the NextGEOSS platform earlier this year. With this achievement (which had been defined a pre-requisite), the NextGEOSS Beta version of the datahub and platform was released in April 2018.

The Beta Release is now available to selected pilot services, and it is aiming at consolidating the NextGEOSS system with the integration of further technical components such as the Service Desk, Operation Analytics Dashboards, and the Single Sign-On User Management. Moreover, this version will enable us to refine the User Experience and to develop expertise to easily adapt to the different pilots’ needs.
During this release, 4 additional services from different EO-related areas will be integrated and experience NextGEOSS’ datahub and platform. One of those services is a new marine-related pilot, Oceanic Drift Models, developed by CLS, which was not originally part of NextGEOSS. The first Public Release will be launched later this year.

Building Earth Observation Applications with NextGEOSS

For the Public Release, NextGEOSS is welcoming expressions of interest from new pilot services supporting the Sustainable Development Goals. The selected new services will be integrated into our cloud platform and have privileged access to the European datahub fully customized to their data needs! The NextGEOSS team has a solid experience in integrating services from several EO-related areas, such as agriculture, biodiversity, energy, disaster risk reduction, marine, among others! Get the unique opportunity to be part of the NextGEOSS’ and benefit from a tailored integration process and dedicated support service for your operations! Send your application to join.us@nextgeoss.eu. You can also find more information on https://nextgeoss.eu/engage-with-nextgeoss.

To show EO users what NextGEOSS offers as a platform and give the opportunity to have a hands-on experience with NextGEOSS tools and services, a one-day Training event “Building EO Applications with NextGEOSS” will take place in Geneva (Switzerland), on the 11th September 2018. The Training will enable first-hand discussions with the NextGEOSS technical team developing and maintaining the platform, and for networking of the existing and new user community.

If you would like to know more about using NextGEOSS to discover, access and process EO data, this Training is ideal for you. Register through https://nextgeoss.eu/second-nextgeoss-training and let us know what are the topics that you would like to see prioritized at the Training!

For more information about NextGEOSS, check out our website. Follow us on Twitter (@NextGEOSS) to get more frequent updates on NextGEOSS activities.

The Arctic is a huge and remote place where physical conditions are extremely challenging. This has always affected field campaigns in terms of health and safety issues and with huge associated costs. Consequently, there is still a big lack of detailed up-to-date maps of the arctic coastal zone which significantly affects the navigational safety in the area. With the increased activity level in the region due to opening of the ice waters, increased tourism, exploration for natural resources etc., this is a big cause for concern for both human lives and potential environmental disasters from groundings. At DHI GRAS, we are working on minimising these risks. With modern satellites and advanced physical modeling of the water column, it is possible to derive reliable water depths in shallow waters at low costs with no risks associated.

map illustration of the resulting bathymetry dataset

DHI GRAS is a leading global provider of satellite derived bathymetry based on our sensor-independent state-of-the-art physically-based models. Together with our local partners in Greenland, our satellite derived bathymetry expert, @Mikkel Lydholm Rasmussen and I have just completed a validation campaign in Greenland. Through collection of multibeam echo sounder data, it was clearly demonstrated that our satellite derived bathymetry product performs very well also in Arctic waters.

With the abundance of satellite image data sources, such as Sentinel 2 and other commercial data sources such as DigitalGlobe satellites, we are now ready to start large scale production of shallow water bathymetry in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic region.

Let us know if you are interested in validation results and the satellite derived bathymetry dataset; RLB@dhigroup.com.

See video:https://youtu.be/vaetuRfyeGY

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The Eurochile Business Foundation was jointly established by the Chilean state and the European Union in 1993. It was created by Chilean law which, apart from defining its fields of action, gave it certain permanent benefits.

Its objective is to promote and strengthen economic and industrial cooperation and technology transfer between the European Union and Chile. Its main method of work is through lines and projects to increase the capacity of management, innovation, staff training, production and marketing of national companies. All of this has a primary focus on promoting SMEs on order to enhance its competitiveness, productivity, and internationalization.

You are dedicated to promoting economic, trade and technological cooperation between the private sector and institutions in Chile and the European Union. What have been so far your greatest achievements and challenges?

Throughout its 24 years of experience, Eurochile has benefited more than 35,000 SMEs (24,142 Chilean/12,543 EU) through projects financed both by the EU and national entities. Eurochile’s achievements include: Participation of 3,743 Chilean SMEs in 216 business/ technology rounds; 24,142 SMEs benefited from 251 capacity building projects; 320 European experts brought to Chile; 4,320 SMEs benefited from 96 projects with European experts to support productive improvements; and 247 technology transfer initiatives. Eurochile has the technical capacity to carry out these activities and it offers a wide network of contacts through its projects, agreements, EEN network, and training sessions.

Eurochile has a large network of collaboration agreements with entities such as ministries, universities, technology centres, business organisations, etc., both in Chile and in Europe. This allows us to liaise with experts to contribute with technical training, identify success stories, best practices with regards to services and technologies developed, etc.

It should be noted that Eurochile has a professional staff that is multi-lingual and therefore can easily translate the relevant information from the official working languages of the EU into Spanish to ensure greater dissemination and support. In addition, we are pleased to announce that at the beginning of next year a Eurochile business centre will be inaugurated next door to our offices that aims to offer office spaces and business services to SMEs and European start-ups (including Chileans with EU ties).

What is the current state of the Chilean EO industry?

There is still a lot of room to grow in Chile in particular with regards to the use of EO that goes beyond the “usual suspects” (government authorities) and should be expanded more to the private sector and SMEs.

In Chile, due to its clear skies in certain regions (extreme north and south) there are worldwide, high class, observatories already installed and there is continuous demand. For example, in August 2008, the government of Chile signed a contract with EADS Astrium SAS for the development of the SSOT system (Satellite for Earth Observation). The SSOT program also included the development and setting up of a ground control segment and image processing facilities enabling the satellites to be directly operated and controlled from Chile by the Chilean authorities. Among other important development was the signing of a collaboration agreement on Copernicus between the European Commission and the Government of Chile in March 2018.

Overall, Chile is already using a whole array of satellites given its geographical and meteorological conditions: meteorological satellites (e.g., Low Earth Orbital Satellite, Geostationary Earth Orbital Satellite); specialized centres (Meteorological Service of the Chilean Navy (SERVIMET); teledetection and sensors.

In which sector (agriculture, energy, security etc…) do you see the EO industry having a growing impact?

Important productive sectors in Chile that could be enhanced via the use of EO are, for example: forestry, agriculture, and renewable energies. Moreover, Chile is a country that suffers from natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, fires and volcanic eruptions where there is surely a great opportunity to create new solutions. The country also faces climate related challenges such as poor air quality in Santiago (and in some other cities) and there exists an expressed interest to strive for a development towards Smart Cities. Below some examples of areas that are of interest to develop in Chile:

• New advances in GPSS and InSAR to identify high geological risk areas (geohazards) such as: earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, glacier movements, etc.
• High quality Data dissemination Platforms (QA/QC) for the Public Policy in Disaster Risk Reduction (RRD) based on science and technological evidence.
• Forest Fires, lead by the Socio-natural Disaster Observatory.
• Operational Oceanography: Ocean Climate (e.g. el Niño) and Ocean Weather Monitoring (e.g. storms)
• Air quality forecasting and diagnostics
• Land use change (urbanization trends, fire, etc.)
• Coastal zones
• Hydro-meteorological extremes
• Integration of Earth Data to biological data of the ocean
• Small deformations of the Earth, the potential of Copernicus and INSAR images

Eurochile is now a relay of Copernicus, how do you envision promoting it?

Since its creation, Eurochile has carried out various activities aimed at strengthening commercial links between Chilean and European companies, the transfer of technology and know-how, and the strengthening of public institutions with the aim of improving the business climate for SMEs. We have extensive experience in training and advising companies, and in organising conferences, seminars, events, and B2Bs. Our work plan to develop and manage the work of the Copernicus Relay is based on these pillars and supported by providing ample information on the Copernicus programme on our website, have available promotional and informational materials in our offices, and organize Webinars and conferences with European experts. We have good relations with regional governments, universities, and SME organisations and companies through our projects with European and national funds. These activities can be incorporated into current and future projects. The transversal priority is the incorporation of advanced innovation and technologies in SMEs and environmental care.

You also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to develop synergies and strengthen cooperation in business, research and technology between Chile and Europe in the utilisation of EO technology. Which element of cooperation in this MoU is the most important for you? What is the added value of such a MoU?

We are very pleased and moreover honoured to have the opportunity to have an MoU with such a prestigious association as EARSC. The primary objective of this MoU is to establish a formal cooperation initiative between both institutions to promote the use of EO technology, support companies in both regions that offer EO-related products and services, and in general promote economic, trade, and technological cooperation through business promotion, and the transfer of technology and know-how.

All the concrete objectives outlined in the MoU are of priority, such as offering and expanding support in connecting European companies with Chilean companies with the aim of incentivising new business opportunities for companies, transfer of technology and innovation, and other collaboration mechanisms. We aim to support each other in the organization of visits to each other’s countries/regions, jointly apply to project funding that would allow us to provide more visibility to the Copernicus programme and the vast European expertise, and regularly exchange information, transfer of experiences and best practices, among others.

EARSC has a valuable base of members, and the experiences of the companies and the association is a valuable asset and contribution to what Eurochile as a Relay wants to accomplish in Chile. We know that there exists an increasingly growing interest in working with Chile, for example within the framework of different cluster platforms. We think that the excellent collaboration already established between our entities is a powerful tool to explore further areas of work in promoting greater use of Copernicus that can in turn help companies to grow in productivity and competitiveness, particularly in sector of importance in Chile like agriculture, mining, energy, forestry, and overall measures to achieve a circular economy.

What are Eurochile’s future goals?

Eurochile strives to continue its legacy of fulfilling its mission of promoting SME internationalization, trade and technological cooperation between the private sector and institutions in Chile and the EU, through business promotion, and the transfer of technology and know-how. We strive to do this by continuously applying to national and European funds and expanding are large network of collaborators in the EU – which include entities from think-tanks, academics, centres of excellence, chambers of commerce, among others. It is important for our Foundation to support SMEs particularly in areas of growing relevance such as the challenges that come with climate change and the shift to a more circular economy and strategies to adapt to the fourth industrial revolution and with that the promotion of advance technologies, sound labour policies, and social cohesion.

Short Biography

Vicente Caruz

President of Eurochile Foundation. In addition, he is director of Desarrollo y Redes and a member of Sociedad de Inversiones Norte Sur and has held several positions in the financial sector. He was also a faculty member of the universities of Chile and Católica de Chile (1965-1985), and member of the boards of several institutions, including the Institute of Engineers.