Oulu is an insightful and down-to-earth city that lives and breathes on the terms of the Northern nature. From its world-class research facilities to its vibrant startup ecosystem, the city of Oulu has consistently demonstrated a commitment to fostering new thinking, advancement, collaboration and entrepreneurship. The citys unique blend of academic excellence, industry collaboration, public engagement and northern spirit creates an environment where innovation thrives. Oulu and North Ostrobothnia ranks number one in Finland in RDI spending, 5,3% of regions GDP. The national target set by the government is to reach 4% RDI spending by 2030. For more than half a century, Oulu's ICT know-how has produced development and new innovations for the whole world, and today almost 3 billion people around the world use the technology developed in Oulu every day The main themes in the city of Oulus Innovation capital 2024 award application are 1) Skills for a sustainable future and continuous learning 2) Long history of cooperation and continuous development of the local R&D ecosystem 3) Co-development and experiments: The city as a testing ground for innovations The city's commitment to youth engagement is exemplary. Oulu's educational institutions, from primary schools to the University of Oulu, emphasize STEAM education and digital literacy, ensuring that young people are well-equipped for the challenges of tomorrow.

Public innovation agencies strive at keeping the pace of SME innovation support demand, and seek opportunities to implement programmes pivoted on new approaches. The INNOCHALLENGE project will engage a consortium of partnering innovation agencies in exploring operating principles underpinning “innovation challenges” and “inducement prizes”, which proved to effectively nurture open innovation at all societal levels. Once operating principles of challenges and prizes are understood, the project will deliver a fully actionable guide (Design Option Paper) to be utilized by EU innovation agencies willing to adopt a challenge-driven approach in activating innovation support initiatives for SMEs at a regional basis. INNOCHALLENGE objectives will be achieved by making use of the Twinning Advance methodology. Good practices of existing inducement prizes and innovation challenges from partnering regions will be collected and afterwards discussed and analysed during three regional workshops. Particular attention will be given to sharing practical know-how over the planning and execution of such initiatives, as well as distilling lessons learned. On the basis of such corpus of knowledge, a novel and standardized format of Innovation Challenge for regional SMEs will be designed by partners. The Design Option Paper (DoP) will include full implementation guidelines and practical suggestions on how to activate such initiative. Collected best practices will be attached to the DoP, which will be disseminated throughout partners’ EU-wide networks, such as three EIT KICs, the EEN, and TAFTIE. Local stakeholders will be involved in the INNOCHALLENGE peer learning and design process: this will allow for the designed initiative to fit with regional specificities such as Industry Clusters, align with priorities set by regional Smart Specialization Strategies, as well as to find synergies with existing ERDF-funded SME support actions.

“Teachers in the Distance” was an Erasmus+ KA2 project.There were 5 Project participants from five diverse educational institutions from five Middle and Northern European countries: Pärnu Adult Gymnasium from Estonia, Ventspils University of Applied Sciences from Latvia, The University of Information Technology and Management Rzeszów from Poland, KURZY ZEBRA s.r.o. – a private language school from the Czech Republic, Oulu-opisto - a community college from Finland. The participants met in an Erasmus+ contact seminar in Tallinn 2017 and created the initial idea of the project. At the time of planning the project the freedom of movement and its impact to education in the emerging necessity of distant learning was found as the most important factor to dedicate this project to the development of teaching languages in a distant way, to raise the ICT competences of foreign language teachers and to support the lifelong learning of language learners and teachers.As a first step, a large-scale survey of language teachers was conducted in all project partner institutions examining the experience of online synchronous and asynchronous foreign language teaching and various aspects of language teaching. On the basis of this, a methodological manual “Methodology for Online Synchronous Foreign Language Teaching” was completed under the leadership of the Czech partners.The next activity was foreign language lessons between the partners in different web-based conference environments, in which focus was on the possibilities of different environments in foreign language learning. Based on the recordings of the lessons and the research, instructional material on the possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of different web environments (Guidebook for Distant Online Language Teaching) was compiled under the leadership of the Latvian partners.In the middle of the Project Covid-19 pandemic broke out and the changed situation in education brought increased demand for distant teaching and online learning with it. The difference in the current needs of teachers for support and additional material was slightly different in different countries, so the project and its outputs were adapted to the current situation and the needs of the participants. The Partners in Latvia and the Czech Republic prepared translations of the Methodology into Latvian and Czech to use and spread it among the colleagues and partner institutions. Due to lockdown and travel restrictions the project was prolonged and teaching-training activity postponed. As it was impossible to organise a face-to-face training because of the restrictions in Finland for foreign travellers (quarantine for 14 days), the training activity was changed to an online training with the same duration. Led by Finnish partners, a five-day intensive training event took place in January 2021 in various video conference environments with the active participation of 21 teachers from all participating organisations, 170 web tools for language teaching were presented and many of them practised in international groups during the training for teaching different skills. Experiences with using different conference tools for teaching and possible solutions for arised technical problems were gathered.The results of the training activity and all previous materials and experiences were used for preparing the online platform where all materials would be in one place, systematized and updated. Our Finnish partners proposed to create an additional tool browser on the platform. Project partners divided the tasks among each other and all gave their input by the revision of already compiled material, specifying the topics and unifying them in bigger meaningful steps, developing a structure for the self-running online course, specifying the conditions for passing the course and obtaining the certificate, by compiling the texts and revision questions. The technicians from Polish partner implemented the technical solution of the platform with the online course, intuitive search tool for web-based tools and the former created methodological manual and Guidebook, also the translations of the Methodology into Latvian and Czech.On the completion of the project, following results were achieved:increasing of number of online courses and teachers providing online language courses;improvement in the quality of distant language teaching;improvement in the quality of foreign language training in distant language learning by making project’s outputs accessible to all teachers and trainers, by increasing the number of teachers and trainers educated in the use of ICT;creation of solid base for future cooperation and sharing good practices between project partners as well as all project partners and organizations taking part in the dissemination activities;increasing partners’ capacity for future international projects thanks to the lessons learned during this project.

<< Objectives >>iREFLECT! initiates the discourse on contemporary teacher education and training and will focus on an innovative approach also in the sense of lifelong learning for all phases of teacher education, by combining a reflection tool and the presentation of central content on the topic of reflexivity,. In this way, iREFLECT! aims to enhance the professionalisation of teachers and trainee teachers by expanding their reflective competence based on their own practice.<< Implementation >>In the project, 5 learning activities will be carried out on site at the project partners, which includes both on-site learning (job shadowing and expert interviews) and joint work on the project content. Between the meetings on site, monthly virtual reflection loops are planned for further work and feedback of testing experiences from the networks. Each partner conducts at least 2 multiplier events in their networks.<< Results >>The iREFLECT! project will offer a compilation of the didactically processed contents and methods for reflective practice in all phases of teacher education. This includes a ToolKit with handouts and a set of cards in which all reflective methods and content are translated into the project languages and English. For accessibility, all contents and methods are additionally visualised.

The main objective of METACITIES is to speed up, consolidate, align and leverage the existing MetaCity and Smart City initiatives of the partner regions, and through this, build the world’s leading connected MetaCity Region across the Baltic Sea (BSR). MetaCity is a novel smart city and urban innovation concept, focusing on open innovation which is supported and encouraged by digital environments and social networks. MetaCity is responding to, and leveraging on the post-pandemic transition to virtual co-operation and virtual urban services. MetaCity is an emerging regional policy objective, already in regional policy planning in Oulu Region and Latvia. MetaCity aims to expand ICT-oriented Smart City development to a wider base of regional innovation capabilities and innovation capture, including for example service innovations and social innovations. The METACITIES project connects a balanced mix of MetaCity and Smart City ecosystems: definite global thematic leaders, thematic followers, urban capital areas, mid-size central towns, and more rural regions. It will strengthen ecosystem collaboration between the MetaCity Regions in the Baltic Sea area and prepare the collaboration opportunity space. It will create a joint action plan for Baltic Sea MetaCity Regions and decide the action plan details in interaction with regional funding decision-making METACITIES aims to position the EU BSR area as the World’s leading “Connected Regional Innovation Valley” for MetaCity innovations