The consortium has been put together, including leading European experts and companies that complement each other in terms of know-how, geographical coverage and field of activity in order to efficiently and effectively deliver the project results and ensure their exploitation and sustainability.
WIP from Germany has been selected to lead the project in view of their extensive experience over the past 30 years with the participation in more than 300 renewable energy projects funded by the EC, being responsible for the coordination and the communication in about half of them.
The following partners have been selected primarily as the leading experts in their field in Europe, providing a mix of skills, expertise and experience that suits the allocated tasks.
The University of Dundee (UNIDUN) brings on board a multidisciplinary team with the involvement of its UK Centre for Qualitative Research in Finance (CQRF), and the Scottish Centre for Economic Methodology (SCEME). They combine unique skills and experience in the behavioural aspects of finance, social finance, crowdfunding, innovation studies and institutional analysis that will be an asset when leading the analysis of the publics’ perception and when drafting the guidelines for the developers and the platforms.
Osborne Clarke (OC) is a multinational law firm. Two of their main sectors (Energy and Utilities and Financial Services) are directly relevant to the project. Most importantly OC is already working on crowdfunding, as they are advising clients, are hosting workshops and have developed the 2013 Review of Crowdfunding Regulation, which will be updated in the project.
youris.com is a communication agency with a platform reaching the public through media, TV and the web that has been used by over 500 research and innovation projects to date. Their expertise and resources will not only be used in the ambitious dissemination plan, but also for attracting responses from all target groups directly in the consultations and workshops of WP2 and WP3.
Additional partners bring to the team representatives from the main target groups. First regarding the crowdfunding platforms, the consortium includes their European Network (ECN), which does not only provide direct access to the platforms, but also brings a wealth of experience in practical, regulatory and market issues. In addition the consortium includes four crowdfunding platforms that have been leading in Europe the use of crowdfunding for renewable energy: ABUNDANCE from the UK, LUMO from France, OnePlanetCrowd (OPC) from the Netherlands and Green Crowding (GC) with activities in Belgium and Germany. They bring to the consortium accumulated practical experience on dealing with crowdfunding for RES projects of different technologies and sizes that are operating in different countries with changing regulatory and market environments.
The next target group are RES project developers and the consortium has three companies that have been developing wind and solar projects in several European countries: BNRG, REG and VALOREM with all of them having some involvement with crowdfunding. Their collective experience covers different project sizes, technologies and operation in different countries with changing framework conditions regarding support schemes for renewables and liquidity by the banks.
Finally, the general public as potential contributors to crowdfunding are not only approached through the ambitious campaign mentioned above. GLOBAL2000 – Friends of the Earth Austria, as partner of the consortium provides direct access to their 55,000 members, while they are part of the Friends of the Earth Europe, providing direct access to 30 similar organisations all over Europe through which several hundreds of thousands of people can be reached. They are part of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental network.
