European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO)
2016-01-01 08:00 - 2026-12-31 17:00 (Europe/Oslo) | ECSO, Avenue des Arts 46 Kunstlaan, Brussels, 1000, Belgium
(NETWORK)

ECSO. “ECSO”. Accessed 14.08.2025. https://ecs-org.eu.

The right place to be for cybersecurity in Europe

The European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO) is a European, cross-sectoral membership organisation that contributes to developing cybersecurity communities and building the European cybersecurity ecosystem.

ECSO federates the European Cybersecurity public and private sector, including large companies, SMEs and start-ups, research centres, universities, end-users and operators of essential services, clusters and associations, as well as the local, regional and national public administrations across the European Union Members States and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).

Mission

ECSO contributes to Europe’s Digital Sovereignty & Strategic Autonomy and to strenghtening its cyber resilience by:

Bringing together the private and public sectors, facilitating their dialogue and joint actions

Empowering communities and shaping the European cybersecurity ecosystem

Federating and providing a platform for collaboration for various stakeholders

European Cybersecurity Investment Platform
2016-09-01 08:00 - 2026-12-31 17:00
(INITIATIVE) (INVESTMENT)

ECSO. “European Cybersecurity Investment Platform.” Accessed 14.08.2025. https://ecs-org.eu/activities/european-cybersecurity-investment-platform/.

About the initiative

The European Cybersecurity Investment Platform (ECIP) is set to be a fund-of-funds mechanism proposed by ECSO as a response to the investment gap in the EU cybersecurity market. With a target size of at least €1 billion, the ECIP aims to strengthen the competitiveness of our cybersecurity market and overall European strategic autonomy.

Since 2016, ECSO has been working with major private investors, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Commission, alerting on the need to increase investments allocated to cybersecurity. In 2020, the Letter of Intentoutlining this proposal to the European Commission garnered the support of 49 prominent public and private stakeholders representing the European cybersecurity landscape.

Building upon ECSO’s initiative, the EIB European Investment Advisory Hub, at the official request of the ECSO-Member Basque Cybersecurity Centre, commenced a feasibility study in October 2021 to assess the market viability and potential structure of the ECIP. The study’s findings unequivocally confirmed the need for the creation of the ECIP. Discover in this page how ECSO continues working with the European cybersecurity ecosystem in concrete steps to establish the European Cybersecurity Investment Platform.

Objectives

Strengthen European cybersecurity market to attract and retain top talent, develop critical competencies, and ensure the strategic positioning of European solutions by enhancing investments in European cybersecurity start-ups and SMEs.

Support European start-ups to consolidate their operations, scale up, and expand their market presence by offering stronger growth-focused financing options, particularly for Series A+. The ECIP is an opportunity to fund late stage companies and create European champions.

Strengthen venture capital capabilities by investing in the existing or emerging European funds specialised in cybersecurity.

Create leverage effect and serve as an incentive among the LPs to invest bigger tickets into the funds by increasing trust in the cybersecurity market.

Stimulate the emergence of new venture capital funds and investment initiatives specialising in cybersecurity by promoting and strengthening the cybersecurity segment.

Support synergy creation in relevant R&D&I funding schemes across Europe.

Norwegian Centre for Cybersecurity in Critical Sectors
2020-09-01 08:00 - 2028-12-31 17:00
(NETWORK) (PROJECT)

NTNU SFI NORCICS. “NORCICS”. Accessed 14.08.2025. https://www.ntnu.edu/norcics.

Centre for Research-based Innovation (SFI)

NORCICS’s vision is to contribute to making Norway the most securely digitalized country in the world, by improving the cyber security and resilience of its critical sectors, through supporting research-based innovation.

Our primary objective is to enhance the capability of private and public sector stakeholders to respond to the current and future cybersecurity risks by developing, validating, and operationalizing innovative socio-technical solutions.

The following secondary objectives will lead to the achievement of the primary objective above:

To generate new knowledge about interdependencies and dynamics in Critical Sectors; and how Cyber Physical Systems especially in Critical Sectors can be attacked;

To design, develop, and test innovative methods and tools for the detection, prevention, and mitigation of cyberattacks against industrial control systems in Critical Sectors, and to validate these in industrially relevant environments;

To demonstrate and validate the efficiency and effectiveness of interlinked cybersecurity measures for control systems in Critical Sectors for selected industrially relevant environments;

To develop novel methods and tools for the improvement of cybersecurity training and awareness, and means for validation of such methods;

To effectively transfer the knowledge created within NORCICS among its user partners, sectoral and industrial clusters, and relevant stakeholders in Norway.

NORCICS has the following work packages (WP):

Research-based innovation roadmap

Foundations

Technologies, applications, and services

Demonstration environments

Dissemination and knowledge transfer

Project management

AI-Mind: Artificial Intelligence for Dementia Prevention
2021-03-01 08:00 - 2026-02-28 17:00
(PROJECT)

Accelopment Schweiz AG. “AI-Mind”. Accessed 13.08.2025. https://www.ai-mind.eu.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 964220. This website reflects only the author’s view and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

What is the challenge?

There are over 50 million people worldwide living with dementia and by 2030 this number is expected to reach 82 million.

The ageing brain becomes vulnerable to decline and keeping independency in daily life can become a challenge for the elderly. People with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), an intermediate condition between normal brain ageing and dementia, may develop dementia in the future.

There is an urgent need for early risk assessment and intervention. Current practices with time-consuming patient investigations focus on late symptoms management due to a lack of diagnostic tools. This causes numerous implications in terms of familial, medical and care costs.

With AI-Mind we aim to reduce the disease’s burden by developing novel, AI-based tools to support healthcare professionals in their diagnosis and offering timely interventions to patients.

At the heart of AI-Mind is our research study, that

Takes place in Norway, Finland, Italy and Spain and will involve 1,000 participants.

Helps to develop and validate artificial intelligence (AI) based tools to predict who is likely to develop dementia.

The AI-Mind project aims to ease the burden of dementia by creating innovative, AI-driven tools that assist healthcare professionals in predicting dementia risks in patients affected by mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Most dementia treatments focus on managing symptoms once they appear, leaving little room for early prevention. AI-Mind seeks to transform this process by replacing complex and inefficient screening methods with advanced, automated tools powered by AI. These tools will address the critical need for early and precise diagnosis, allowing doctors to identify patients at high risk of developing dementia with greater confidence.

Digitalization, innovation and network effects in rural and mountainous regions: a study of the status quo and opportunities for the IMS
2021-06-01 08:00 - 2022-05-31 17:00
(PROJECT)

The IMS project was completed in 2022 with support from the Eastern Norway Research Institute (a division of the University of Inland Norway) and SINTEF, one of Europe largest independent research institutions. The project was managed by an affiliate of VentureNet, which VentureNet acquired in 2023, and the project received co-financing from the Research Council of Norway and Innlandet County through the FORREGION program.

Background: small-and-medium-enterprises (SMEs) need help with data management.

Problem: Limited availability and access to private sector (business) data.

High cost of generating business data and analysis for startups and SMEs.

High cost of harmonizing business data using Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI).

Opportunities: make business analysis more cost-effective for SMEs using Big Data.

“Core” business data points are reused in sales, fundraising and other processes.

Gather existing “core” business data using Big Data to save time and cost for SMEs and advisors.

Exchange “core” business data across digital platforms to save cost and generate revenue for SMEs, advisors, customers, investors, making SME data more valuable and cost-effective to analyze.

Challenges required advanced knowledge of regional dynamics and data science.

Lack of digital platforms designed to make use of business data exchange and virtual networking.

How to build a network of businesses and advisors that benefit from enriching and exchanging data.

Technical bottlenecks in Big Data related to data harmonization, enrichment and exchange.

Project objective

Inform design of a main research project to develop new machine-learning and data exchange models for Big Data and digital B2B platforms that accelerate digitalization, innovation and network effects for SMEs in rural areas.

Hypotheses for lower growth rates in rural and mountainous regions:

The Lemon Problem: lower trust in SMEs due to a lack of verified data (“Information Asymmetry).

Lower access to capital and specialist expertise in non-metropolitan areas (“Agglomeration Effects”).

Lower growth ambition? The Inland region of Norway has a high proportion of micro-enterprises.

Is this due to a perception of lower access to private capital?

Possible lower access to specialist/M&A expertise?

Other factors, such as cultural factors, systemic inequalities or biases, or lower competitiveness?

Project Results

Key results from the University of Inland Norway

Statistical analysis of ICT companies in the Inland region using publicly available data from Proff.

Use of Centralization Index as a basis for future ethnogeography studies and statistical analysis.

Mapping of advisory services and financial services available for companies in Innlandet.

Questionnaire templates to evaluate knowledge and utilization of digital tools and advisory services.

Other relevant suggestions from HINN colleagues for use in future research projects:

Social network analysis and gender study methods to analyze cultural and systemic factors linked to growth.

Analysis of industry clusters and network effects to identify best practice and factors linked to value creation.

Key results from SINTEF

Clarified that the IMS has an innovative approach to data enrichment, which can be used to develop advanced machine-learning models with Humans-In-The-Loop, a current challenge for data scientists.

Identified opportunities to reduce time and cost of data entry by using machine-learning techniques for data harmonization and enrichment.

Identified areas for further development: Data Fusion, Dynamic Data Enrichment, Data Exchange.

Delivered a toolbox and recommendations for potential suppliers and partners to enhance the IMS:

Several leading data sets providing broad access to available business data in Norway and Europe.

Leading ontologies and vocabularies for harmonizing and enriching data with machine-learning.

Advanced methods and software for data mining, harmonization, and enrichment.

Project Outcomes

Clear path for development of advanced Big Data solutions (software, methods and data).

Data Harmonization/Fusion: integrate multiple data sources to dynamically produce structured data.

Data Enrichment: develop HITL machine-learning models to dynamically enrich missing/incomplete data.

Data Exchange: re-use “core” business data securely and cost-effectively across platforms and users.

Scalable frameworks and templates for further research and studies into regional dynamics.

Plan and partnerships to build a user ecosystem and test platform for data exchange.

Clear project opportunities and expressions of interest from leading research institutions.

SINTEF invitation to join the EU Horizon “EnrichMyData” industrial research project with OECD.

Dialog with SINTEF and NTNU-NorCIS to establish NRC Collaboration Project in cybersecurity.

Private sector consortium of digital platforms in NRC Innovation Project (IPN) for data exchange.

Assisting INN to establish “Inn-the-Loop” NRC Social Impact Project (KSP) in artificial intelligence.

Dialog with INN and IESE Business School to apply for EU Horizon Expanding Investments Ecosystems.

Want to learn more?

Contact VentureNet for more information about the project results and collaboration opportunities.
