PVF’s mission is to stimulate synergies between enterprises, education and research in its five strategic sectors. PVF aims at creating added value and employment and at enhancing competitiveness for companies in the French regions Grand-Est and Burgundy-Franche-Comté. For these purposes, PVF offers several services and a close personal follow-up to all members, and initiates collaborative projects and accompanies their coordinators/participants.
PVF also participates or even coordinates parts of the development of the two Regional Innovation Strategies, acts as coordinator and participates in several regional programmes dedicated to e.g. Industry of the Future or to future Skills and Competences. PVF also represents its members in regional and national associations or working groups.
· Access to public support (regional/national programmes, innovation vouchers, etc.)
· Access to private funding (connecting to investors, seed-capital, venture-capital, crowd-funding, etc.)
· Facilitation of collaboration between members
· Periodic Information dissemination
· Support of knowledge transfer
The Pole Vehicule du Futur (PVF) has been created in 2005 and totals in October 2018 nearly 400 members, of which nearly 350 are companies of different sizes. PVF has two branches, the first one focussing innovation and research, and the second one focusing on more production related issues and industrial performance.
PVF works around five strategic sectors: (1) Energy and Propulsion, (2) Materials, processes, (3) Industry of the Future, (4) Infrastructure & Communication and (5) Mobility services, and on five different markets: Automotive components, Electric vehicles, Hydrogen vehicles, Recycling, Mobility services.
Since its creation, PVF and its members got 198 projects funded for more than 680 M€. 33 projects got European funding (FP6, FP7, H2020, COSME, Interreg, Eurostars, …), and the others profited from French national, regional and/or private funding.
Via its members, PVF has access to different testing centres for automotive, transport, mobility and industry 4.0 issues:
· Car2Road: test centre for ITS and connected mobility
· R&D Moteurs by Faurecia Clean Mobility: high performance test benches for ICE engine tests
· ERCOS: test centre for ergonomic virtual systems
· 4iTech: test centre for Industry 4.0 solutions
· Platinum3D: test centre for additive manufacturing (industrial 3D printing)
In January 2017, PVF and eight other European automotive clusters created the European Automotive Cluster Network EACN aiming at developing projects between their members and at cooperating in common R&D and investment projects focusing problems of the factory of the future in the automotive sector with its multiple ongoing challenges (electric vehicles, autonomous vehicle, shared vehicles, ...). This network is at the initiative of this co-funded COSME project 'EACN for Joint Industrial Modernisation Investments'.
PVF is also member of the cluster network Pôle Auto Europe regrouping the automotive clusters out of the Belgium-Luxembourgian-German-French Greater Region area.
