Dear SymCubator Community members

Herewith I would like to invite you to our first General Assembly of the SymCubator Community on 18 December 2017 in Paris at Artiste en Herbe; 106, Rue du Chemin Vert; 75011 Paris (20 minutes by public transport from Gare du Nord). We will start at 10:00 and end the meeting at 17:30, followed by joint self-funded drinks and dinner, for those keen to continue. Please register here.

Let me start by sharing some SymCubator news with you. Over the past months we have been busily incubating the SymCubator itself.

Back end of May we have founded the first national SymCubator association in France, kindly domiciliated at the premises of the company of one of our member. The SymCubator now has a bank account and is hence ready to receive first donations (please see here for more information on how to proceed).

Early July the SymCubator Executive Board (the SCEB) held its first meeting. Its nine members represent a spectrum of 3 European countries (Austria, France and the UK), a wide range of backgrounds and competencies (industry, IT, philosophy, political acting, security, social sciences, natural sciences, communication, international management, EU programmes etc.).

Operations to incubate the SymCubator are well in progress. First exciting symVentures - from different areas - have been proposed by members of the SCEB.  This allows to fine-tune the SymCubator methodology to assess such proposals and then support and monitor the labelled symVentures and, at the same time, to progress with their incubation as if they had been already labelled. This methodology will be presented at the General Assembly.

Over the summer, the SymCubator participated on behalf of one of the initial symVentures in a consortium which submitted a highly interesting Horizon 2020 proposal at the end of August. This demonstrates, if needed, the potential of the SymCubator to provide operational support to the incubation of symVentures. This opportunity had come from one of the SymCubator members.

 In October, another European project consortium running since several years, a FP7 Network of Excellence, then decided to work with the SymCubator to incubate the set-up of a sustainable virtual centre of excellence beyond its project duration. This illustrates the opportunity that the SymCubator offers to help to contribute to sustainable impact of collaborative research and innovation undertakings.

Our first general assembly meeting pursues several objectives:

• Connect members of the SymCubator Community together.
• Share and align our visions about the purpose and practical ways to move forward with the SymCubator.
• Make the SymCubator Community become reality and empower you to contribute your skills, ideas and contacts and, if possible donations.

In this sense, I keenly invite you to register here to the event.

Best regards.

Christian