Operating with open innovation principles, ekip will establish a partner and network-driven policy recommendation engine to continuously drive the formulation and adoption of policy development recommendations for Europe’s Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). This will result in support and guidance that strengthens the capacity for CCI-actors to engage in and contribute to complex innovation processes. The interplay between the projects activities will allow us to deliver two objectives – building the meta-network amongst ecosystems and developing the knowledge-based and participatory policy engine – which will come together in making the third objective – supporting the development for CCI-centered ecosystems – possible. The engine is designed to in three main phases (i.e. five steps) achieve this: -Assess needs for future R&I actions - List of defined policy areas together with a meta-network of networks covering all member states and the CCI diversity. -Mapping of needs CCIs; tech, invest, skill, regulation - Investigate prioritised policy areas looking broadly and across sectors, also focusing on recommendations that will (i) increase the CCIs’ readiness for green and digital transitions as well as for the rest of the economy and society. -Identify and propose key actions - Formulate policy recommendations, also giving practical guidelines of how to implement and track development in ecosystems. ekip brings together highly networked and diverse organisations with strong track-record in research, innovation, and policymaking for and with the CCIs. Beneficiaries from 12 countries with different social, cultural, and economic contexts. Leading universities with expertise on research and innovation in culture and creativity. Organisations with online data collection and analysis competences and visualisation skills. Specialised policy consulting companies and advisories will be linking practice, research, and innovation with policy development for the CCI.

Motivated by the challenges, risks and opportunities that the wide use of AI brings to media, society and politics, AI4Media aspires to become a centre of excellence and a wide network of researchers across Europe and beyond, with a focus on delivering the next generation of core AI advances to serve the key sector of Media, to make sure that the European values of ethical and trustworthy AI are embedded in future AI deployments, and to reimagine AI as a crucial beneficial enabling technology in the service of Society and Media. The AI4Media consortium, comprising 30 leading partners in the areas of AI and media (9 universities, 9 research centres, 12 industrial partners) and 35 associate members, will establish the networking infrastructure to bring together the currently fragmented European AI landscape in the field of media, and foster deeper and long-running interactions between academia and industry, including Digital Innovation Hubs. It will also shape a research agenda for media AI research, and implement research and innovation both with respect to cutting-edge technologies at the core of AI research, and within specific fields of media-related AI. AI4Media will provide a targeted funding framework through open calls, to speed up the uptake of innovations developed within the network. A PhD programme will further enhance links to the industry and the fostering and exchange of talent, while providing motivation to prevent brain drain, and a set of use cases will be developed by the network to demonstrate the impact of the achieved advances in the media sector. The Excellence Centre that is established during the AI4Media project, and the ecosystem that will grow around it, will provide a long-term basis for the support of AI excellence in Europe, long after the project end, with the aim of ensuring that Ethical AI guided by European values assumes a global leading role in the field of Media.

Europe urgently needs to restore and intensify its engagement with its past. Time Machine will give Europe the technology to strengthen its identity against globalisation, populism and increased social exclusion, by turning its history and cultural heritage into a living resource for co-creating its future. The Large Scale Research Initiative (LSRI) will develop a large-scale digitisation and computing infrastructure mapping millennia of European historical and geographical evolution, transforming kilometres of archives, large collections from museums and libraries, and geohistorical datasets into a distributed digital information system. To succeed, a series of fundamental breakthroughs are targeted in Artificial Intelligence and ICT, making Europe the leader in the extraction and analysis of Big Data of the Past. Time Machine will drive Social Sciences and Humanities toward larger problems, allowing new interpretative models to be built on a superior scale. It will bring a new era of open access to sources, where past and on-going research are open science. This constant flux of knowledge will have a profound effect on education, encouraging reflection on long trends and sharpening critical thinking, and will act as an economic motor for new professions, services and products, impacting key sectors of European economy, including ICT, creative industries and tourism, the development of Smart Cities and land use. The CSA will develop a full LSRI proposal around the Time Machine vision. Detailed roadmaps will be prepared, organised around science and technology, operational principles and infrastructure, exploitation avenues and framework conditions. A dissemination programme aims to further strengthen the rapidly growing ecosystem, currently counting 95 research institutions, most prestigious European cultural heritage associations, large enterprises and innovative SMEs, influential business and civil society associations, and international and national institutional bodies.

InnoCreate is an ambitious coordination and support action aiming to stimulate the growth of the creative industries in Europe by overcoming challenges at individual SME level (small size, problems with access to finance, barriers to new market entry…), at the innovation support level (disparity in availability and quality of support) and at overall creative industry level (fragmentation, localisation…). InnoCreate will respond by networking innovation support players and harnessing their regional strengths into a European ecosystem of supports to respond more effectively to SME needs. Two specific end user groups of SMEs will be targeted through InnoCreate: creative industry SMEs exploiting advanced technologies and ICT SMEs innovating in the field of creative industries. Both of these target groups will be equally supported. SMEs will benefit from an imaginative programme of communication and support actions: InnoCreate will piggy-back on the Creative Business Cup to raise awareness about the ICT Challenge competition, network SMEs throughout Europe at the InnoCreate International Camps and provide customised one to one supports for the most promising SMEs with high growth potential. InnoCreate galvanises existing structures by bringing together three strong existing European networks – EBN, CKO and the ECB Network and a network of innovation multipliers at regional level. The InnoCreate service offering aims to be immediately accessible online and ‘on-site’ in 15 EU partner and associate partner countries with a target of engaging further stakeholders to deliver the support services in all EU member states by the project end. The impact of InnoCreate will be tangible – for individual SMEs, for innovation support actors and for the growth of the European creative industries as a whole.