The FINEST Twins project will build a multidisciplinary smart-city Center of Excellence (CoE) that mobilises all leading smart city actors and stakeholders in Estonia and establishes solid long-term high-level research, knowledge-transfer and innovation partnerships with the counterparts from the Helsinki region to capitalise on the macro region’s scientific research, innovation and entrepreneurship potential. The CoE will match the leading smart city research centres globally and focus on all five key domains of clean and sustainable smart city development: mobility, energy and built environment glued together by governance and urban analytics & data management (research streams). The FINEST Twins will have a globally unique focus on developing user-driven clean and sustainable smart city solutions that are “cross-border-by-default” in the context of emerging twin city between Tallinn and Helsinki. For this purpose, the CoE will set up an Urban Open Platform Lab (UOP.Lab) that develops and implements Research and Innovation (R&I) pilots. The CoE will attract international expertise and investment, and act as a springboard for exporting Finnish-Estonian knowledge and high-tech solutions globally. In the long run, the CoE has full autonomy, financial sustainability and it will increase Estonian R&I funding by 2% annually with a strong spill-over to the real economy. The CoE will have autonomous management, premises and 5 research streams producing the following KPIs by 2027: ·Estimated 100 research publications annually ·Estimated 150 Horizon 2020/FP9/ERC/Interreg/national submissions during the project period ·Estimated 25 local research and innovation partnerships ·Up to 15 Double degree PhD graduates annually ·The CoE will build knowledge transfer infrastructure, the UOP.Lab, via: · Estimated 100 unit innovation vouchers given out; · Rent-a-PhD and Startup-in-Residence programmes applied to PhDs and companies ·Minimum of 10 cross-border R&I pilots