The overall mission of the Austrian EU Council Presidency conference on “Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities for a European Research Agenda - Valuation of SSH research in mission-oriented research” is to bring valuation (i.e. the provision of added value through SSH) and impact contributions of SSH research to transformative, mission- and challenges-oriented national and European research and innovation agendas to the forefront, to openly reflect and structurally discuss the topic in order to make it visible, debatable, verifiable and usable! In line with this mission, the objectives of the conference are 1. to provide a reflecting and forward-looking format to identify and appraise valuation pathways and impact generating processes within genuine SSH research and in inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research activities that include SSH and arts-based research 2. to showcase, learn from and discuss structures and policies which are beneficial for an enhanced impact-orientation of SSH research at various level (e.g. project-level, institutional level [including measures and programmes], R&I policy-making level) 3. to make a contribution to tracing, assessing and measuring the use and impact of R&D activities from the field of SSH to the benefit of a transformative and mission-oriented European research and innovation agenda.

"The aim of in.education was to increase the educational participation of people with a disadvantaged educational background through developing and testing three different strategies. Three curricula were developed and tested with the participants.“IO 1 – The sensibilisation and education offer for persons close to educationally disadvantaged people”: The socioeconomic environment has an influence on the educational pathways of individuals, including on whether educationally disadvantaged people can be reached at all through traditional educational methods. An innovative outreach concept was therefore developed as part of the project. Members of exemplary social environments of the target group were identified and then participated in awareness raising and education offers. These were intended to activate the participants as new multipliers. They should then inform educationally disadvantaged people from their social environments about educational offers and formats and motivate them to participate. Addressed as new multipliers were individuals with a migration background, workers’ councils, volunteers in organisations or churches or councillors of e.g. long-term unemployed people with no specific knowledge of educational disadvantages. As implementing modes, workshops were tested in different designs or modern forms such as webinars. The experiences and results were summarised in a manual: ""Workshops for New Multipliers. Experimental and Experimental Investigations in Europe"". The entire outreach process was evaluated and published: ""New Strategies to Involve Educationally Disadvantaged People in Adult Education Activities"".“IO 2- Curriculum for the collection and validation of informally acquired educational competencies”: In this part of the project, the team focused on the individual level. It developed educational offers for educationally disadvantaged people with basic education problems. In these offers, the collection, description and validation of informally acquired competences was strictly implemented. Through this genuine resource-oriented approach, it was demonstrated that consistent empowerment directly causes educational participation. Approximately 70% of the participants in the educational offers developed in the project subsequently attended other educational programmes, reaching from the completion of compulsory education to the attendance of language or basic training courses to labour market-related educational programmes. Participants were: Single mothers of different ethnic origins and ages, physically and mentally disabled persons, individuals with no specific language skills in the education language of the respective country, young adults from structurally weak emigration regions largely without perspectives, etc. 44% of all participants were motivated to participate in these programmes through the sensibilised new multipliers of IO 1. Experiences and results were published in Manual 2: ""New Strategies to Involve Educationally Disadvantaged People in Adult Education Activities"". The evaluation was made available in the publication: ""(Re)engagement of disadvantaged learners with education through validating informally or non-formally acquired competences"".“IO 3- Trainings for adult education providers to increase their implementation skills as regards less educated people”: The core questions of the intellectual part of this project part was: Which competencies must an organisation develop in order to ensure the successful participation and quality of results for educationally disadvantaged people? Starting from the conditions of the implementation of the programmes in IO 1 and IO 2 and the results of a project-based background study (interviews with education managers in the UK, Ireland and Austria), trainings for employees of adult education institutions were developed and implemented. The content ranged from questions regarding the selection and inclusion processes, diversity-led interactions in the classroom, validation of competencies, recognition of deficits to aspects such as group composition and to questions of educating education staff. Country models, recommendations and conclusions are available in manual 3: ""Training for providers of adult education to increase their competence in the performance of offers, in which educationally disadvantaged people participate. Results and reflections"".The background study with the title ""Necessary prerequisites at the organisational level for (re) engaging disadvantaged learners in education."" was also published.The products contain information on the process, the content and the methodology. Recommendations were formulated and conclusions drawn and they provide insights into the accompanying scientific process. They are available for download on the websites of the partners, e.g. on www.isop.at/in.education."

The Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics (IMBG) is one of the leading research centres in Ukraine in the field of analytical biotechnology, with a great potential for the development of market-driven innovations. With the support of high-profile research and innovation (R&I) institutes from Europe, which, together with IMBG form the BIONANOSENS consortium, the Ukrainian institute should be positioned as an international Centre for Excellence in analytical biotechnology also beyond national borders. BIONANOSENS implements tailor-made twinning actions helping to build and strengthen capacities at the beneficiary’s end. Both the overall goal and the single objectives related to it (to establish institutional grant management procedures, better access to international networks, project proposal writing services, promotion and training of young researchers, service and facilitation to the dissemination and exploitation of research results etc.) are taking into full account IMBG’s current operational situation. BIONANOSENS further exploits the findings of a SWOT analysis, which was conducted for IMBG from 2012 to 2013 as part of the COMBIOM project (FP7). All activities are carried out against the state-of-the-art standards in managing EU funded R&I projects – including Responsible Research and Innovation, gender balance, open access (data management, Intellectual Property management), exploitation and commercialisation orientation, and ethics.

The aim of the MSCAdvocacy project is to provide direct support to better align MSCA cooperation mechanisms of 20 key partner countries and 6 regions with the European Commission’s Global Approach to Research and Innovation. The project will become the strategic link between 1) the European Union’s external policy objectives, 2) bilateral and bi-regional S&T agreements with key partner countries and regions, 3) the corresponding R&I cooperation roadmaps and action plans, and 4) MSCA promotion in the field. With MSCA being the central international component of Horizon Europe (HE), its researcher mobility programmes directly contribute to the objective of the EC’s Global Approach such as strengthening commitment to international openness and fundamental values, rebalancing towards a level playing field and reciprocity, ensuring a free exchange of ideas and fostering research in key areas such as a green transition, the digital transition, global health, and innovation. However, in several key partner countries and regions MSCA do not seem to reach their full strategic potential in line with the objectives mentioned above. Hence, the project will do its part in supporting the strategic alignment of participation and cooperation mechanisms for MSCA to the priorities set on policy level. This will be achieved by 1) reviewing broader policy orientations and monitoring existing cooperation mechanisms with the target countries and regions relevant for MSCA; 2) conducting a Coordination and Support Mission to the targeted countries and regions in order to promote MSCA cooperation opportunities; 3) adressing analyses, reviews, and policy briefs to bilateral and bi-regional R&I policy dialogues; 4) and providing recommendations for long-term strategic promotion in MSCA consistent with EU R&I bilateral and bi-regional cooperation roadmaps and action plans.

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has shown the importance of the global maker community for a rapid response to the lack of medical hardware supplies and reveals the great social innovation potential of the maker movement. In Critical Making we want to add scientific insights into the potentials of the maker movement for critical, socially responsible making, and show how these communities can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open innovation. Thus, we will study grassroots innovation processes taking place in maker spaces, hacker spaces, fablabs, etc. and online spaces and relate them to RRI practices. More specifically, we will search for and analyse existing innovation and co-design processes taking place in these open spaces to find out in how far they reflect or contradict RRI principles. Following a mixed method approach will enable us to collect data, analyse it, actively improve practices and develop theories and synthesise findings. Next to analysing existing practices, we will co-design, evaluate and disseminate concrete interventions that aim to foster RRI principles in the maker movement. In three case actions the project will specifically look at aspects of gender, openness and the recruitment of young talents. As a result we will co-define measure how to better implement RRI principles in the open innovation movement taking place across maker communities. Our findings will provide hands-on input for practitioners in the field and will enrich the scientific knowledge base in the RRI community on innovation processes outside of academia, aiming to harness the full innovation potential of the global grassroots maker movement.