Widening Countries (WCs) such as Türkiye, Poland, Greece, Malta, North Macedonia are falling behind in the rapidly evolving Alternative Proteins (APros) sector, which is crucial for addressing global food security and climate change. Closing the skills gap in these regions is essential for ensuring competitiveness and driving sustainable food innovation. The APRISE project focuses on enhancing the capacities of diverse talents in these WCs, providing advanced training and promoting collaboration to strengthen the APros sector. By uniting 18 partners from academia, industry, and non-profit sectors, APRISE delivers a comprehensive approach to talent development. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary knowledge transfer, including technical training in APros production, sustainable practices, and consumer science, as well as professional skills such as policy advocacy, project management, and entrepreneurship. Through secondments and structured training programs, APRISE equips talents to address sector-specific challenges and contribute to sustainable growth. Additionally, APRISE offers a Return Plan to support reintegration into home institutions, ensuring that the skills and knowledge gained are applied to long-term career development. The project’s efforts will significantly increase the capacity of talents across WCs, enabling them to play key roles in the future of the APros sector and ensuring lasting impact in both research and innovation ecosystems.

The proposed project addresses the action for “Establishing services “Enhancing the innovation management capacity of SMEs” in the Enterprise Europe Network” to improve the innovation management capacity of SMEs. In the period covering the years 2008-2014, Tier 1 and Tier 2 services were offered to SMEs by EEN Anatolia Consortium. (The contents of Tier 1 and Tier 2 were respectively generic promotion, networking services given by EEN staff and specialized advisory services given by innovation advisers). The activities foreseen under this proposal is to give Tier 3 services to SMEs. 64 full enhancing SMEs’ innovation management capacity service packages and 8 Key Account Management service packages will be offered to SME’s till the end of 2016 and every service package is foreseen as 7 days in the proposal.