RRI-LEADERS adopts a meso-level approach, and will explore the application and sustainability of the RRI paradigm within territorial innovation systems. In RRI-LEADERS a “territory” is understood as a confluence between three interconnected primary aspects: geographical location, socio-economic and cultural bonds, and administrative authority. The project will involve four distinct territories from different parts of Europe, representing different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, different scope of territorial oversight, different institutional and decision-making infrastructures, different R&I landscapes, and different dynamics among territorial actors. As such, the four territories will represent a diverse range of opportunities and implications for RRI, which will enable the RRI-LEADERS consortium to carry out a thorough assessment of the RRI relevance to territorial governance and have the involved territories act as demonstrators for the potential of RRI on subnational level. The partners will engage in a multi-stage co-creation process (referred to as RRI-AIRR) that will mobilise territorial quadruple helix stakeholders towards the elaboration of future-oriented strategy and action plans - territorial outlooks for each of the participating territories. Territorial partners will have the leading role in this process, and will additionally work to ensure the broadest societal and governance-level endorsement. The Consortium will further use the accumulated knowledge to chart a detailed outlook for the future potential of RRI as a guiding framework in territorial governance of R&I, and will aim to provide an evolutionary perspective on RRI for the upcoming Horizon Europe programme.

CIMULACT has as a main objective to add to the relevance and accountability of European research and innovation – Horizon 2020 as well as national - by engaging citizens and stakeholders in co-creation of research agendas based on real and validated societal visions, needs and demands. The project will expand the outlook and debate on STI issues, increase scientific literacy in a broad sense, which includes the understanding of the societal role of Science, Technology and innovation (STI), and create shared understanding between scientific stakeholders, policy-makers and citizens. This multi-actor approach will embrace EU28 plus Norway and Switzerland. The CIMULTACT builds on the principle/conviction that the collective intelligence of society gives Europe a competitive advantage, which may be activated to strengthen the relevance of the European science and technology system. By establishing genuine dialogue between citizens, stakeholders, scientists, and policymakers visions and scenarios for the desirable futures will be developed and debated, and transformed into recommendations and suggestions for research and innovation policies and topics. In short, CIMULACT will ● Create vision and scenarios that connect societal needs with future expected advances in Science and their impact on technology, society, environment etc. in connection to the grand challenges ● Provide concrete input to Horizon 2020 through recommendations and policy options for R&I and simulated calls for the Horizon2020 Work Programmes. ● Engage citizens and stakeholders in a highly participatory debate/consultation/process on scenarios for desirable sustainable futures and research ● Build capacities in citizen and multi-actor engagement in R&I through development, experimentation, training and assessment of methods for engagement ● Facilitate dialogue and shared understanding between policymakers, citizens, and stakeholders ● Reveal the relative merits of the citizen focussed consultations

Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

Hydrogen is being pursued as a promising route to store energy, potentially mitigating the unpredictability of electricity generation based on renewables. Provided that more than 95% of H2 produced comes from breaking the C-H bond in hydrocarbons, it is natural to think that storing H bound to C may provide a long-term solution to this challenge. However, liquid hydrocarbons are not an optimal solution given that the process of extracting H from them involves CO2 emissions. LESGO proposes to store energy in the C-H bond of reduced graphene oxide (rGO-H). rGO-H can be stored safely, exhibits an energy density more than 100 times larger than that of H2 gas, and can be easily transported wherever the electricity generation is needed. LESGO will demonstrate that rGO-H can become an ideal energy stock at an affordable cost and used to supply electrical power on demand where it is required. In the complete cycle from sun light to electrical power the raw material for storage evolves from graphite back to graphite with no CO2 emissions in any intermediate step. LESGO’s consortium has been structured to bring together a highly interdisciplinary community that will enable the emergence of an ecosystem around a circular economy relying on the use of: widely available raw materials, storing energy in chemical bonds, using it in applications that require electrical power, and finally recovering the materials for a second or multiple lives. Industrial (GRAPHENEA, HST, GENCELL and CRF), academic (UDE and AALTO) or research center (IREC and ICFO) activities are completely interwoven throughout the entire implementation of LESGO. Within the duration of LESGO, CRF will develop an application in the transport sector where rGO-H will be tested as the fuel in a support battery providing a fast charging for current electric vehicles. When looking ahead beyond the consortium, DBT will foster the engagement of a wider stakeholder/public community to consolidate the ecosystem around rGO-H.

The Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) model has been successful in attracting investments in energy efficiency, but mainly for single, large projects. Energy efficiency programs, on the other hand, constitute an alternative path to scaling up the number of buildings that implement energy efficiency interventions, but the practice of rebates and incentives that are paid up front creates a need to rely on deemed energy savings and on complex and costly regulations that hinder innovation. SENSEI will propose a solution to this deadlock. Building on earlier successful experimentation outside of the EU, we will design concepts and business models that will help: (a) generate new sources of benefits that increase the value of an energy retrofit project by enabling the compensation of energy efficiency as an energy resource, and (b) turn the project’s value into an investable asset to attract private financing. The main concept underlying the SENSEI business models is pay-for-performance (P4P), which offers an effective way to engage both energy providers and third-party investorsin energy efficiency. SENSEI will first elaborate P4P schemes for financing energy efficiency that can be implemented across the EU, and then integrate these P4P schemes with the preparation and implementation stages of the EPC model, with the intention of increasing and/or financing the gains in a building’s value that are produced by energy efficiency improvements. The developed concepts will utilize actual building data and the consortium’s competences to carry out a series of negotiation games among all SENSEI parties – representing all links in the EPC and P4P chain. The project has planned a series of activities to both disseminate the insights from these games and to support stakeholders in using our recommendations with the goal of rolling out the first P4P pilots in the EU.