The focus of Cross4Health is to move beyond the state-of-the-art practice of regional clusters to unlock the collaborative potential of the SMEs from Aerospace, Biotechnology, Energy, ICT and Medical Devices (ABEIM) sectors in generating innovative solutions, business models and work-flows that enhance patient-centered personalized care for societal challenges in health, delivered through the Medical Devices new emerging industry value chains. By providing a framework for a more structured cross-sectoral and cross-border collaboration, that manages all the complex reactions within the process, Cross4Health instantiates the mechanisms to ensure the long-term sustainability of the action. The main outcome of the Cross4Health project will be a portfolio of innovative services, processes and products conceived in an intelligent ‘plug-in’ platform for ABEIM stakeholders by high performance crossover teams. This will increase the competitiveness of the SMEs, advancing the positioning of European countries in this new emerging market. All these will be achieved by pursuing the following project objectives: • Establishing Open Innovation Spaces where all the involved parties set the priorities and the challenges. • Generating added value, leveraging expert knowledge, new partnerships and market support by providing targeted monetary (competitive grants) and non-monetary (innovation vouchers) support mechanisms. • Facilitating fast testing and business hypothesis validation via large-scale demonstrators. • Facilitating sustainability by validating complementary funding streams and alignment with RIS3 strategies. Cross4Health Vision is to work towards the osmosis of technologies, culture, teams and businesses among the selected sectors, tearing down the blocking barriers to realize significant advances in Health, growth and employment for new and/or improved products, services and processes.

DanuBalt delivers professional and efficient processes and tools to ensure high quality service, empowering Stakholders to implement their high growth strategies and overcome barriers through innovation. DanuBalt will analyse the mechanisms hindering the efficient exploitation of EU and regional instruments in the Baltic Sea and Danube macro regions as well as proffer remedies in order to improve investment in regional health systems by efficiently using Structural Funds in combination with H2020. The two regions have been chosen because not only of their vast geographical coverage but also because they are facing similar problems and confronting them at different speeds and in different ways. DanuBalt will conduct an analysis on the determinants influencing the health R&I performance in the first place. Based on the analysis, the health niche markets with unique selling points will be identified. In line with the regions’ smart specialization strategies the potentials of the regions will be defined. The next step will be to identify common patterns and individual differences within the regions in order to suggest recommendations and develop action plans. Based on the latter, transnational pilot activities will be developed showing a way forward to increase investments in health research and innovation projects. Besides, DanuBalt will offer a linking platform for both macro regions to explore the commonalities without discarding the regional specificities for best practice exchange, peer learning and opportunity exploitation. DanuBalt actions intend to impact upon improving the innovation capacity of the two macro regions, increasing participation and efficient exploitation of synergies. A distinct exploitation plan with recommendations and business models ensures sustainability of the processes and tools developed. DanuBalt is implemented by experienced partners on capacity building in innovation and research management, policy support and community animation.

The INNOLABS project is cluster/network driven and grounded in the conviction that cluster organizations guarantee a better understanding of what kind of services and added value can be provide to their “clients”. Its specific focus is on unlocking the cross-sectoral collaborative potential of SMEs in combining ICT with the BIO, Health and Medicine sectors representing an emerging but still under-utilised market, and applying such results to personalized ehealth for elderly populations in both rural and urban areas. mHealth is another area within INNOLABS that will help in leveraging outstanding results. The innovations created by the combination of different value chains get to market fast and need to adapt constantly to changing end-user needs. INNOLABS will study the characteristics in market dynamics and specificities for innovations created by merging ICT and biomedical research. The main outcome of the INNOLABS project will be a catalogue of monetary and non-monetary measures provided by regional innovation clusters to support SMEs to deliver timely and innovative products and services increasing the competitiveness of the SMEs and advances the positioning of European countries in these new emerging markets. Achieving long-term sustainability will be another of INNOLABS targets. All these will be achieved by pursuing the following project objectives: 1) Test and validate optimal support measures sensitive to the specific characteristics of ICT and biomedical markets by comparing measures for traditional value chains with new fast lane measures. 2) Increase the competitiveness of SMEs by using targeted non-monetary support mechanisms that generate added value encompassing expert knowledge, new partnerships and market optimisation of products 3) Secure new funding streams to facilitate sustainable cycles of collaborative IHBM innovation by SMEs on new market platforms.

One of the key challenges facing the European society is the demographic change and the effect that this risks to have on the European health care systems. Rising life expectancy and the ageing population, which will increase the number of elderly people that need health care, will put our health systems under further stress, including health workforce shortages and insufficient public funding.In order to respond to this challenge, a wide range of eHealth solutions are being developed and proposed, with the objective of 1) ensuring good quality care, despite less resources available, 2) supporting health care workers to ensure more transparent communication channels and 3) empowering patients and relatives to better participate in their own health.An overall European challenge is that many of these solutions do not reach full implementation stage because; a) the solutions have too often not been developed in close collaboration with the health staff; b) lack of overall digital competences and specific eHealth literacy within the staff and c) there are barriers to changing organisational practices, pathways and models of working that enable smart solutions to be deployed.The Digital & Innovation Skills Helix = The DISH project will develop three different concepts; 1) a concept for a “learning innovation unit” based on a triple helix partnership to ensure better development and uptake of eHealth solutions, 2) a concept for on the job training, providing staff in the health care sector with better eHealth competences and 3) a concept to assess and acknowledge skills and comptences, which ensures the recognition and mobility of health care staff.The project includes a preparation phase, a development phase and a testing phase, where health care providers, eductional institutions and clusters work closely together, which ensures that the deliverables are developed as close to the real needs as possible and to improve the level of exploitation of results.