"The [Booster] services provided invaluable assistance to the consortium by refining KERs, enhancing their applicability and usability, and outlining clear and practical exploitation paths."
Booster supports EU-funded projects across a wide range of fields, helping research results find their way into practical, real-world applications. From health and sustainability to security and digital innovation, Booster helps researchers and their projects go beyond generating knowledge and ideas to making real and tangible impact.
This was the case for MEDEA, an EU-funded project tackling complex security challenges in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. By working with Booster (formerly Horizon Results Booster), MEDEA turned its research findings into impact, ensuring that security practitioners could effectively use the project’s results.
Bridging research and real-world application
MEDEA set out to create a network of security practitioners across the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. The goal? To identify and document security needs, ensuring first responders and policymakers had the right tools to address both current and emerging threats. While the project successfully identified key security gaps, a major challenge remained, namely, how to make sure these findings would be implemented effectively?
Booster provided expert guidance to MEDEA, helping the project consortium refine its key exploitable results (KERs) and define clear paths for their practical use. Through personalised support, Booster experts worked with MEDEA to strengthen its strategy, ensuring that research insights didn’t just stay on paper but could be put into action.
Tailored support for real impact
One of the biggest hurdles in EU-funded projects is ensuring research findings lead to meaningful change. MEDEA, being a network of practitioners rather than a commercial entity, faced specific challenges in the exploitation phase. Booster stepped in to offer strategic mentoring and tailored recommendations on how to navigate these obstacles.
George Kokkinis, MEDEA Coordinator stated: “Although the project had identified several Key Exploitable Results (KERs), the [Booster] service provided invaluable assistance to the consortium by refining these KERs, enhancing their applicability and usability, and outlining clear and practical exploitation paths. This included detailing the implementation process, necessary deployment steps, and the expected benefits for the practitioners”.
The mentoring covered everything from defining concrete implementation steps to identifying potential users and stakeholders, helping MEDEA move from research to action.
Sustaining MEDEA’s impact beyond the project
Thanks to Booster’s support, MEDEA created a sustainable framework for ongoing collaboration and policy influence. Even after the project ended, the Mediterranean and Black Sea network of practitioners has continued to build on its achievements, ensuring long-term engagement between security experts, policymakers, and innovation providers.
Key follow-up actions have included:
These steps have ensured that the work initiated by MEDEA continues to shape security policies and practices in the region.
MEDEA’s journey shows the true value of Booster’s services. By offering professional, free-of-charge support, Booster helped MEDEA transform its research into practical solutions with lasting impact. As Kokkinis explains: “Undoubtedly, the [Booster] services supported MEDEA in generating concrete value from its research and innovation efforts, resulting in a greater societal impact as envisioned by the European Commission's initiative. The MEDEA project leveraged the [Booster] services to not only meet but exceed its dissemination and exploitation obligations, setting a benchmark for other EU-funded projects”.
About MEDEA
MEDEA was an EU-funded project focused on strengthening security in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. By establishing a network of security practitioners, the project identified and documented the security needs of first responders dealing with migration, border management, cross-border crimes, and natural disasters. MEDEA categorised these security needs into current, emerging, and potential threats, providing valuable insights to policymakers and security professionals. The project played a key role in shaping future security strategies and collaboration across the region.
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''The collaborative experience with all the involved partners was very fruitful in terms of guiding me on what was expected from Booster services. That was key to deliver a final report that covered their expectations and needs.''
"Horizon Results Booster services were very helpful. It was useful to understand how exploitation could go beyond direct commercialisation. Through these seminars, I realised that in fact it could be applied to many fields."
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"Horizon Results Booster was very helpful for the support of the project exploitation in this particular phase of consolidation. DENiM received good feedback regarding the current development level, in particular for the Key Exploitable Result characterization and the first business model produced by R2M Solution. At the same time the booster service provides us a helpful tool to investigate missing points."