Supporting small business
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for close to two-thirds of Europe's employment and GDP. SMEs benefit from bioinformatics training - online and face-to-face - as well as vital data and services offered through EMBL-EBI.
In addition, EMBL-EBI organises an annual forum and workshop series where SMEs can discuss common issues in bioinformatics and get up to speed with EMBL-EBI's wide range of freely available resources, including web services.
Past SME Forum events
The 6th Annual SME Forum: Barcelona, Spain, 8-9 October 2012
The 5th Annual SME Forum: Bioindustry Park Silvano Fumero, Piemonte, Italy, 6-7 October 2011
“The future of healthcare depends on integrating technologies. Bioinformatics can help us solve biological problems, to manage and analyse the output of our activities for the benefit of companies beyond the life science sector.” -- 2011 SME Forum host Fabrizio Conicella of BioPmed
The 4th Annual SME Forum: BioM and the European Patent Office, Munich, Germany, 18-19 October 2010
In addition to the presentations, discussion and networking opportunities, there was also the opportunity for some hands-on tutorials at the offices of the EPO. The workshop was highly subsidised through the generous contributions of the hosting organisations (BioM and the EPO) and financial contributions from a number of EU projects (ENFIN, SLING, CALBC and ELIXIR) that are coordinated by EMBL-EBI and are targeted to provide bioinformatics tools and data resources for European research.
The 3rd Annual SME Forum: Austria Wirtschaftsservice, Vienna, Austria, 3–4 September 2009
The event was supported by Austria Wirtschaftsservice (AWS) and featured presentations from EMBL-EBI, the European Patent Office, AWS and SMEs based in Austria. The programme covered small molecule resources (ChEMBL and ChEBI), proteomics services, literature services, web services and the patent searching services providing both by EMBL-EBI and the European Patent Office.
The 2nd Annual SME Forum: Berlin, Germany, 27–28 October 2008
To subscribe to the EMBL-EBI SME Forum mailing list, please register your email address here.
SME Forum: 6 March 2014
EMBL-EBI's annual workshop for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), hosted by sponsoring institutes throughout Europe, is designed to help smaller companies gain optimum value from freely available bioinformatics services. The event features high-level overviews of our core molecular resources - many of which can be downloaded for local use - and of services such as programmatic access to our databases. We also discuss international data sharing agreements and EMBL-EBI's roadmap for future developments.
In 2014 we have the great pleasure of conducting our SME forum in the new South Building on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus with the support of One Nucleus, a key life-science and health SME cluster in the United Kingdom. The event will take place on Thursday, 6 March 2014.
