procurement and report on the state of the market in three years. 3.2. Scale up cybersecurity investment in Europe and support SMEs While innovation in cybersecurity sector is booming in Europe, the EU still lacks a sufficient culture of investing in cybersecurity. There are many innovative SMEs in the field but they are often unable to scale up their operations. This is, among others, due to the lack of easily available funding to support them in the early phases of development. Companies also have limited access to venture capital in Europe and their available budget for marketing to improve their visibility, or to deal with different sets of standardisation and compliance requirements, is inadequate. At the same time, cooperation between cybersecurity players is quite patchy and further effort is needed to increase economic concentration and develop new value chains31. To scale up cybersecurity investment in Europe and support SMEs, it is necessary to ease access to finance. There must also be support for the development of globally competitive cybersecurity clusters and centres of excellence in favourable regional ecosystems for digital growth. This support needs to be linked to the implementation of smart specialisation strategies and other EU instruments so that the cybersecurity industry in Europe takes better advantage of them. The approach of the Commission will be to maximise awareness in the cybersecurity community of financing opportunities at European, national and regional level (related to both horizontal instruments and specific calls32) by using existing instruments and channels e.g. the Enterprise Europe Network. The Commission will supplement these efforts by exploring with the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Investment Fund (EIF) ways of easing access to finance. This can be in the form of equity and quasi-equity investments, loans, guarantees to projects or counter-guarantees to intermediaries, e.g. through the creation of a Cybersecurity Investment Platform under European Fund for Strategic Investment33. In addition, the Commission would also look into developing with interested Member States and regions a Cybersecurity Smart Specialisation Platform34. This would help coordinate and plan cybersecurity strategies and set up a strategic collaboration of interested parties in regional ecosystems. This approach should also help unlock the potential of existing European structural and investment funds for the cybersecurity sector. More generally, the Commission will promote a security-by-design approach. It will seek to ensure that cybersecurity requirements are consistently addressed in all major infrastructure 31 See SWD(2016) 216. See e.g. multi-sectoral 2016 call for proposals under the Connecting Europe Facility programme, 2016 COSMO calls related to Cluster Internationalisation Programme. 33 In the framework of the European Fund for Strategic Investment individual projects can be supported either directly or indirectly through Investment Platforms. Such Platforms can help finance smaller projects and bundle funds from different sources to enable diversified investments with a geographic or thematic focus. 34 See smart specialisation instruments (RIS3): http://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/. 32 11