RurInno acknowledges social enterprises as promising but often neglected drivers of social innovations in structurally weak rural regions that tackle social problems and stabilise and improve the living conditions in these regions. But reports show that social entrepreneurs still lack specialised trainings and education, a supporting infrastructure and recognition. Against this background, RurInno aims at 1) strengthening the skills and the innovative capacity of social entrepreneurs operating in rural regions, 2) improving the knowledge of how social innovations are implemented in rural regions and 3) raising awareness of social entrepreneurship in rural regions in order to foster enabling environments for their activities. The successful implementation will be enabled by the close collaboration of two outstanding research institutes and four award winning social enterprises with complementary expertise - including ERs, ESRs and administrative staff. The short project duration of 26 months will generate rapid outcomes that increase the competitiveness of social enterprises. We will strengthen the innovative skills of social entrepreneurs with a structured training programme and knowledge exchange. Both will be enabled during innovation secondments, taking place in the research institutes. Multifaceted training modules like workshops, field inspections, research-practice labs and joint analyses sessions foster skills enhancement in different ways: knowledge sharing and applying, best practice learning, learning by doing and learning from comparisons. We will enhance the knowledge about the innovative capacity of social enterprises in rural regions by field research in the four participating social enterprises and their respective rural regions. We will integrate the social enterprises into the research process as objects of investigation. Thus, we will enhance the perspective from doing research on social entrepreneurs to doing research with social entrepreneurs.

AgriBIT aims to increase the precision, accuracy and continuity of services to deliver improved Precision Agriculture (PA) services to farmers, leading to a reduction in costs through decreased use of inputs (water, energy, fertilisers, pesticides), lower environmental impacts and increased production yields. It positions its innovations both at the level of intervention on the field and the capturing of the effects of PA over time, intelligently exploiting the information acquired before, during and after direct intervention on the field. AgriBIT combines augmented GNSS and EO information with 1) on-field and on-machine sensors and actuators, and 2) expert agricultural knowledge to deliver simple, high precision and continuously available services. It develops and extends advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms to fully exploit this rich set of inputs to recommend actions to farmers building on past history and present context and to ease their workload through improved automation. AgriBIT delivers operational services (3 GNSS-enabler services, 8 GNSS-enabled services) and 1 European sourced high precision GNSS affordable receiver that cover the complete value chain of PA, from monitoring to application and precise and automated machinery guidance. With 70% of European farmers active in small to medium operations, AgriBIT’s European sourced high precision GNSS receiver at an affordable price is a major technological and societal contribution to Europe’s farming community. AgriBIT delivers collaboration services supporting farmers and service advisors, but also 3rd party developers for whom open interfaces are provided both at service level and as channels for advanced Big Data Analytics innovations. Over 36 months, AgriBIT includes 20 months piloting at 3 locations, 12 months testing of collaboration services and delivers TRL-8 results. AgriBIT involves 5 solution providers (4 SMEs), 1 research centre and 2 farmers cooperatives with 11.250 members.

On B2B and B2C relations, the reliability among stakeholders is an essential requirement. Every second of every day, businesses exchange items with suppliers, partners, customers and others. Items mean goods, services, money, data and more. Such exchanges are transactions, that need to be reliable, precise and agreed among the participants. Moreover, in many transactions, the fully automation is not possible, it is needed a trusted centralized entity. In many cases, the human intercession is needed to certify the proper execution of such transaction (audit, public notaries, third-party certifier…). Blockchain aims to enable automatic transactions, reducing the "trust tax" among stakeholders. It is being used in more and more domains. However, Blockchain cannot fully ensure that the digitally recorded information is taken in a certain location and time. The automated and trusted Proof of Location has not been fully achieved without the human intercession. A reliable and affordable source of positioning/timing data is essential to achieve the automated verification of location and time. The new service Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OS-NMA) of Galileo will provide authentication of the navigation data, in order to determine if the data used for processing was produced by the satellites or falsified. The overall goal of SPACE4GREENERis to propose a technological solution that enable a trusted platform among stakeholders of different nature for the automated certification that an activity occurs or a thing is in a location in a certain point of time, without requiring a third-party human certification. The solution is based on the integration of Galileo OS-NMA signals and Blockchain with smart devices and mobile platforms that will produce a trusted information and share it among the stakeholders. The benefit of such approach is applicable to multiple domains, but the technical validation will be focused on Agrifood and fishing scenarios.

The overall objective of APOLLO is to develop a commercial platform that will provide a suite of farm management advisory services specifically designed to address the needs of small farmers. APOLLO will use state-of-the-art methodologies for the calculation of agricultural parameters based on EO data, taking advantage of the improved spatial and temporal coverage of the new Sentinels. APOLLO will produce data on agricultural parameters through available EO, meteorological, and auxiliary data. Especially for the calculation of soil moisture, SAR images will be used for the first time with Sentinel-1, making it possible to obtain maps with a spatial and temporal resolution not achievable before. Based on the agricultural parameters calculated, a suite of farm management services (tillage scheduling, irrigation scheduling, crop growth monitoring, and crop yield estimation) will be developed, and will be delivered through a web and mobile interface. The service requirements will be elaborated in close collaboration with end users. APOLLO services will be cost-effective and affordable, thanks to access to free and open Copernicus data, an automated processing chain for the delivery of agricultural variables, independence from the need for ground-based sensors, and the pioneering use of Sentinel-1 data for estimating soil moisture information. The APOLLO platform and business case will be validated through pilot testing in Spain, Greece, and Serbia, with the participation of small farmers, agricultural consultants, farmers’ associations, and SMEs providing farm management services. A business strategy for the take-up of APOLLO will be developed, assessing the operational sustainability of the platform based on market revenues. According to the preliminary business plan developed, APOLLO has the potential for a Return On Investment (ROI) of 18% - 51% in 3 years (for the low and high uptake scenario, respectively).

In the last years, extreme weather patterns of water scarcity (droughts) and water abundance (floods, rapid showers) are becoming more frequent and prolonged in the EU. If we do not remedy this situation, by 2050 water scarcity will lead to €12,2 billion losses per year and affect 17% of EU population. RAINS will contribute to improve the resilience of EU agriculture to water scarcity by demonstrating 10 solutions (irrigation practices, technologies and tools) that will increase the efficiency of water and nutrient management in agriculture and reduce the impact of extreme weather events. RAINS solutions include alternative forms of water supply, combined use of water and biofertilisers, improved soil water-retention, water-N/P modelling and some smart solutions (Optifangs-IA, WaterIQ) to contribute to decision-making and to integrated irrigation management across farm systems. Solutions will be demonstrated at 10 demo-farm systems representing agroecology, organic production, conventional, intensive and urban agriculture, replicated in Greece and Spain. We will also develop a hydrological and N/P model to optimised agriculture production at catchment level. A well, we will conduct co-creation workshops, knowledge transfer activities and create materials such as guidelines (2), White Papers (2) and Practice Abstracts (40). Policy focused sessions will deliver 3 sets of policy and incentives recommendations, engaging quadruple helix agricultural stakeholders, to pave the way for the uptake of sustainable irrigation and fertilization management solutions in practice in the EU. In the long term, RAINS will contribute to improve water efficiency by 50% in 12,700 ha. in more than 20 EU regions, and support >500 farmers in the transition to a more sustainable irrigation. And by 2050, the implementation of the RAINS project will save up to €6.1 billion, 244.348 million litres of water and 35.4 t CO2 eq. avoided emissions.