CONNECT is a Knowledge Alliance that promotes innovative cooperation between universities and enterprises in the cultural sector across Europe. Over the course of 36 months (from January 2017 to December 2019) 3 universities from ES, PL, UK; 5 private organisations from IT, ES, DK and UK; 1 public body, the municipality of the City of Warsaw, and 1 major EU network from BE, have joint efforts to CONNECT students and practitioners to the real-world job market by developing entrepreneurship and leadership skills.During the project a new Twin-track programme (TTP) in audience development for students and practitioners working in arts management has been designed and launched by a transnational team of 46 researchers, teachers and trainers in 5 national hubs in Spain, UK, Italy, Denmark and Poland, each one composed by higher education institutions and private cultural organisations. In order to ensure the TTP was set up correctly, at the beginning of the project a detailed needs analysis of the selected target groups was conducted in ES, IT, DK, PL, UK. The research findings are available on the project’s website.The TTP is based on multidisciplinary training modules mixing formal and informal learning methodologies and digital resources. At the core of the programme is the concept that postgraduate students and senior practitioners from cultural organisations attend a course where they are paired and asked to work in couples on an audience challenge. In this sense, each couple defined and implemented together an action-research project in the cultural organization where the practitioner worked. Problem based learning inspired the entire learning experience. In order to make this happen, students became interns of the practitioners’ cultural organisations during the months of the action research project. Moreover, a mentoring programme was also setup to support both students and practitioners throughout this process.The seven modules that configure the backbone of the TTP are the following: (1) Introduction and key concepts; (2) How to understand your organization; (3) How to understand your audience; (4) How to develop strategies and ideas; (5) How to design your experiment and make the case; (6) How to lead change and (7) How to promote positive organisational change. The first 4 modules are the theoretical modules, whereas modules 5,6 and 7 are related to the action-research project design and implementation.According to the TTP evaluation, we can state that CONNECT has supported the development of new entrepreneurial attitudes that the participants actually reported in their feedback. The following elements contributed to the way entrepreneurial skills and attitude were actually enabled: the mentoring scheme, the teaching modules to develop soft skills, the facilitation tools and methods adopted in all modules, and the Action Research itself.CONNECT has achieved the following results:* A new training programme on audience development supported by a Mentoring Scheme for the development of transversal skills, reflective practice, entrepreneurial mind-set to adapt to continuous change in the labour market.* 2 Winter Schools in audience development (Turin 2019 & Bilbao 2019) and participation in 2 EU forums* Impact: 63 postgraduate students (junior profiles); 61 cultural practitioners (senior profiles); 41 mentors (senior profiles + experts in audience development) and 32 trainers, all of them in 5 different countries (Spain, UK, Italy, Denmark, and Poland)* An EU platform with new digital resources supporting audience development internationally, by drawing on academic sources and in-work practice.* A mutually supportive network and learning community of academics, practitioners and students in audience development.* An innovative model of cooperation between universities and cultural organisations

Human-centred generative Ai fraMework for culturaL industriEs’ digital Transition (HAMLET) aims to democratize access to Generative AI in Europe's Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). Its mission is to make Generative AI benefits accessible to entities of all sizes, in order to foster a sustainable digital transition. The strategy involves integrating a digital collaboration platform, the "HAMLET Collaborative Community Hub" enabling entities across different sectors to pool investments, share facilities, exchange competencies and employ shared investment and profits-based collaboration models. In parallel, HAMLET produces 7 diverse AI Enablers for CCIs as demonstrators of the framework, which streamline the creative process. These enablers are designed to be integrative, promoting collaboration by facilitating seamless interactions and project co-creation among various CCI stakeholders. By intertwining these two core components, HAMLET not only provides the technological infrastructure necessary for embracing digital transformation but also cultivates an ecosystem where collaboration and shared success are the norms. Moreover, HAMLET is committed to exploring and researching novel business models, including mechanisms for profit sharing and equitable distribution of benefits derived from collaborative efforts, aiming to lower barriers to AI adoption and to establish sustainable frameworks that incentivize shared success and innovation. This cohesive approach ensures that barriers to adopting AI technologies are significantly lowered, enabling a more inclusive and dynamic creative sector that is equipped to navigate the complexities of the digital age. Through HAMLET, smaller actors of the European CCIs are empowered to explore new horizons of creativity and innovation, solidifying Europe's position as a global leader in cultural and creative excellence." HAMLET will be tested through 4 pilot cases involving different CCI sectors across 4 countries in Europe.

SMEs and public sector organizations increasingly investigate the possibilities to use cloud computing services in their everyday business conduct. Accessing services and resources in the cloud on-demand and in a flexible and elastic way could result in significant cost savings due to more efficient and convenient resource utilization that also replaces large investment costs with long term operational costs. On the other hand, the take up of cloud computing by SMEs and the public sector is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and also security concerns. The Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application (COLA) project aims to increase the adoption of cloud computing services by the above mentioned two strategic target communities. Typical industry and public sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers with dynamic resource demands, and to suitably optimize resource consumption and costs. However, the dynamic and intelligent utilization of cloud infrastructure resources from the perspective of cloud applications is not trivial. Although there have been several efforts to support the intelligent and coordinated deployment, and to a smaller extent also the run-time orchestration of cloud applications, no comprehensive solution has emerged until now that could be applied in large scale near operational level industry trials. The overall objective of the COLA project is that by building on and extending current research results, it will define and provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. COLA will demonstrate the applicability and impact of the solution via large scale near operational level SME and public sector pilots and demonstrators, and will also define a clear pathway how the innovation can be delivered to the market.