"DECISO - DEVELOPERS OF CIRCULAR SOLUTIONS” aims to support the delivery of services to induce investments projects for developing circular economy at local and regional scale in the following regions: Hamburg. Northwest Germany, West Macedonia, Alentejo. This is in line with implementing the European Green Deal and the EU circular economy action plan. DECISO will accompany the actions aiming to provide assistance for promoters in the development of financial schemes/programs for projects on Circular Economy, based on the concept of Circular Economy Ecosystem (CEE), which implies mobilizing local stakeholders and, when necessary, citizens, and scaling up the results from the local, to the national and European levels. The CEE approach will make it possible to deal with economic, organizational and cultural change through systemic solutions that involve all the players in the value chain of an asset and all those who can influence, even indirectly, its value. This approach also allows reducing risks for investors, because ecosystems with all their key factors, including geographic location, cultural factors and institutional support, actively help an innovation become successful. Since the paradigm of the Circular Economy Ecosystems can be declined in different ways, based on the objective of the initiative, the local context, the type of actors and the sector, the DECISO approach will be implemented in different local contexts and topics in order to produce guidelines that can facilitate the replicability of the initiatives put in place considering all the technical, economic, legislative, and social factors that can determine the success or failure of the initiatives.

SMARTUP is the result of a smart cooperation effort between higher education institutes, companies, the EU Crowdfunding Network and business foundations from nine EU countries and Stanford University. The aim is to develop an innovative Startup Master & Advanced Reflective Tools through cooperation between Universities and companies belonging to innovative sectors, based on the idea that students need entrepreneurial competences to succeed: both hard about management and innovation, and soft and transversal skills, including those for self-awareness and resilience. SMARTUP offers wide-ranging support to face the challenges inherent in the entrepreneurial process, by providing a smart way to become a startupper in work and life. The project will build offline and online tools to support students in the early stages of enterprise development, from crafting their idea to accessing finance. A smart open space will be provided where would-be entrepreneurs can share knowledge and know how - but also tricks and tips – to face the challenge of creating a successful start-up; the community will be animated by students, startuppers, teachers, mentors, entrepreneurs, and investors. A key component of this supporting path will be a Master programme – developed and tested by participating universities in close cooperation with the other partners - linked to online instruments and contents, including serious games, coaching apps, and mentoring and mindfulness tools. SMARTUP will therefore integrate the different contributions of participating academic institutions and business organizations by means of new methodological approaches, in order to produce two main outputs: an innovative Master on entrepreneurship and an inclusive web portal for students and startuppers willing to improve their entrepreneurial knowledge and mindset.

The project addresses such problems in the economies and higher education systems of Belarus and Ukraine as marginalized private sector and insufficiency of today approaches in teaching engineering and entrepreneurial culture shaping.The project Goal was to develop an environment that stimulates engineering creativity, entrepreneurial activities and fosters youth employability via university-business-industry networking on FABLAB platforms. Five university fabrication laboratories with innovative equipment have been created in universities of Belarus and Ukraine for implementation of students’ engineering projects. These serve as university-enterprise “meeting points”, opening networking opportunities in both directions. Five training packages including eLearning materials have been developed in English and Russian using the competence-based approach and in accordance with the requirements of the Bologna process. These combine creative engineering and business aspects for building up hard and soft skills of students, trainees, LLL and are based on modern pedagogical approaches. Engineering curricula of respective specialties has been modernized in accordance with the training materials developed.The project created a strong impact on various levels: on the institutional level the fablabs and a data base of e-Learning materials are free to use by students and all the university staff in their daily educational process. On the local, regional and in the wider society these have been included into the fablabs activities via a sustained information campaign involving local printed and electronic media. On the national level development of the network infrastructure for youth innovation entrepreneurship support was facilitated by twinning academia/industry and academia/business through encouragement from national public bodies. At international level a contact network for exchanging good practices, experience sharing and future project implementation has been developed.

The world is losing its wild species and ecosystems at an alarming rate, and Europe is no exception. Yet, biodiversity is the basis for functioning ecosystems, which provide essential goods and services for humans and all other life forms on Earth. We must therefore reverse the trend of BD loss in the foreseeable future, especially by addressing underlying, indirect drivers of biodiversity loss such as consumption patterns, norms and values to achieve double decoupling (of consumption from excessive natural resource use, of satisfaction from consumption). Such transformative change requires social innovation and improved, systemic governance approaches. Additionally, digitalisation and emerging technologies offer potential to support the conservation of biodiversity, increase society well-being and economic prosperity which should be harnessed while reducing their equally existing negative impacts. GoDigiBios aims to support biodiversity-relevant transformative change towards a nature-positive economy and society that will use new digital and other emerging technologies in ways that assist in reversing BD loss. Specifically, GoDigiBioS will deliver i) comprehensive understanding complemented by new insights and operational knowledge of the interactions between biodiversity, social and economic well-being, and technological development, ii) tools to support biodiversity-relevant decision-making, iii) improved, systemic policy mixes and governance approaches. To co-produce these knowledge, tools, and governance approaches, GoDigiBioS will bring together and leverage the knowledge and experience of both researchers and stakeholders from four peri-urban transformation lab regions across Europe and use specific approaches to ensure scalability and replicability of its solutions.

Lower population and business density make it more challenging to develop private businesses and public services in rural areas, negatively impacting socio-economic indicators. Rural areas are key to solve climate change, food, biomass and energy challenges. Favourable climate for entrepreneurship is needed for better provision of jobs, basic services, including health and care, connectivity, smart transport, energy solutions and attractiveness as whole, overcoming digital divide between rural and urban areas. AURORAL focus on delivering a digital environment of interoperable services through platforms able to trigger dynamic rural ecosystems of innovation chains, applications and services. Thus, AURORAL contributes to increasing economic growth in rural areas and to tackle significant societal challenges. AURORAL digital environment is demonstrated by cost-efficient and flexible cross-domain applications through large-scale pilots in five European regions. AURORAL digital environment builds on an open, API-based, interoperable and federated IoT architecture and includes a reference implementation supporting flexible integration of heterogeneous services, bridging the interoperability gap of the smart object platforms and creating markets for services in rural areas. AURORAL digital environment addresses the integration of data and information across different platforms, establishment of an open market place, large-scale demonstration, multiplication of novel applications, the leverage of infrastructure and inclusion of public services. AURORAL pilots follow an evolutionary agile, well-delineated, and lean approach demonstrated in large-scale applications capable of meeting social and economic objectives critical to boost new rural services and business. AURORAL digital environment supports a vibrant ecosystem of developers, service providers and user communities and addresses barriers currently opposing the socio-economic development of rural areas.