PROcurement Capability - Embedding and Driving INnovation (PROCEDIN) Legal reforms, European, national and regional policies, growing expertise, guidance, tools and case studies, and networks of early adopters are all key foundations for the adoption of (public) procurement of innovation (POI) practices, bringing together business and public sectors. If it is to drive deep, systemic change, the rate, scale and scope of POI adoption must increase. This project will accelerate POI in a specific domain covering two critical areas of innovation – circular economy and green mobility – in the context of European cities’ innovation for sustainability and resilience agendas. The consortium will leverage existing resources and its members’ extensive, pan-European professional networks, and initiate new provisions, to enhance and mobilise POI motivation, knowledge and skills. By mapping the complex landscape of growing expertise, experience and learning infrastructure, and relating resources to the varied needs of different stakeholder archetypes (defined by organization type, extent of POI experience etc), key gaps in provision will be identified and addressed. Particular attention is paid to promoting enduring access to, and increased uptake of, POI guidance and learning resources for buyers and vendors, and to building leadership capacity for driving and embedding innovation through strategic procurement.

The Building Capacities in Innovation Procurement for Cities (BUILD) project will roll out a number of training and capacity building actions targeted at upskilling the public procurers on the topic of innovation procurement. Public procurement is a powerful instrument to drive faster adoption of innovation among public sector users while simultaneously promoting economic growth by providing innovative companies opportunity for first user references. The strategic use of procurement to boost demand for innovative goods of services has become an important part of the innovation policy agenda in many EU countries, and is at the core of the new EU public procurement directive (2014/24/EU), which underlines importance of opening opportunities for public procurement of innovation (e.g. by introducing a new innovation partnership procedure). BUILD integrates the highest-quality capacity-building tools to facilitate the roll-out of capacity building and training services to cities. BUILD will engage and train public – private procurers, SMEs and startups via both onsite and online avenues on a number of topics like; 1) Guiding Principles (Valonia) 2) Legal Knowledge and Procedures (Rotterdam) 3) Preliminary market consultation (CE) 4) Pre-commercial procurement (Turku) 5) Competitive dialogue (Turku) 6) Competitive procedure with negotiation (Tartu) 7) Innovation partnership (Valonia) 8) Legal questions and considerations (Rotterdam) and 9) Risk assessment (Valonia). Lastly, BUILD will link and establish synergies with research and innovation projects funded by the EU (via Horizon Europe or other EU funding programmes), with specific focus on EU funded projects fostering PPI, with the aim of facilitating mutual learning and knowledge exchange and will also set up a pro-active dissemination action which will facilitate outreach to key target audiences, namely; public and private buyers, public-owned enterprises, SMEs and start-ups, research institutions among others.

The MED region includes more than 25 million hectares of forests and about 50 million hectares of other wooded lands. Climatic and socio-economic changes in this region could have serious consequences for forests, potentially resulting in the loss of ecosystem services and causing a wide range of economic, social, and environmental issues. The low competitiveness of the forest-wood supply chain in European Mediterranean (EUMED) countries is currently amplified by the missing or limited access of forest managers and companies to current and new digital technologies which appear to be out of date in certain key areas or fail to address some of the most pressing difficulties that the industry is expected to be confronting in the next decades. This rationale calls for the urgent implementation of a multi-actor approach to digitalization, starting from recognizing stakeholders’ needs and subsequently defining joint actions. To this end DigiMedFor's overall goal is to transform the technological landscape of the Mediterranean forest-wood supply chain by increasing its competitiveness, thus allowing the different stakeholders to better manage and supply multiple forest ecosystem services, including the traceability of wood origin from forests to end-users. In line with the EU forest strategy and the EU digital strategy, DigiMedFor will employ advanced and innovative digital solutions to improve the monitoring and management of forest resources along the supply chain from their origin up to the wood industry, optimising both the sustainability of wood production and traceability and delivery of ecosystem services. DigiMedFor will address the synergetic use of geo-spatial, AI, and modelling technologies, combining them with ICT.

Microorganisms thriving in extreme environments are a largely untapped reservoir of enzymes, chemicals, and pharmaceutical compounds. Their unique metabolic pathways and regulatory mechanisms enable them to survive under harsh conditions and represent invaluable resources to produce innovative bio-products, offering solutions to address challenges that conventional model organisms cannot. However, extremophile microorganisms remain remarkably underutilized as providers of bio-based solutions. Sampling extreme environments, screening, identifying and isolating the pertinent microbes is cumbersome, costly and imposes a significant environmental footprint, resulting in low yields, elevated costs, and extended times to market. Developing innovative methodologies is imperative to surmount these barriers in the study of extremophile microbiomes, and to leverage their capabilities for ecological and economic benefits. XTREAM will unlock the potential of aquatic extremophiles for the discovery of enzymes, drugs, metabolites and chemicals by interdisciplinarily developing innovative tools to facilitate rapid, efficient and sustainable exploration of extreme microbiomes, heralding a new era in the industrial application of extremophiles. The expected results of XTREAM include discovering microbes, enzymes, resistance genes and biosynthetic clusters, with a hybrid workflow of in silico and microfluidics-based discovery, resulting in the commercialization of e.g. ≥200 enzymes for biocatalysis and biorefining, 3 new solutions for antifouling, increasing the revenue of our industrial partners by ca. 10%. XTREAM assembles 5 leading European SMEs, 4 academic teams and 4 RTOs that have pioneered approaches in functional metagenomics, extremophiles, microfluidics, microbial ecology, and synthetic biology. Diverse XTREAM partners (from synthetic biology to ingredients) at different stages in the research-to-market process provides a unique opportunity for broad value creation.

Battery innovation has played a major role in the development of new energy production & transport technologies, becoming true enablers of a clean, affordable and secure energy economy. However, innovation is currently being hindered by the lack of understanding of the processes happening at atomic levels in the batteries' interfaces and interphases. Thus, the OPINCHARGE consortium aims to develop a set of effective operando nanoanalytical techniques and methodologies to understand the interfacial processes in batteries in unprecedented level of detail. For this, 10 organizations from 7 different countries will work together, combining their expertise and infrastructure, to find new ways of addressing this challenge. This will be fostered through 3 main pillars of technique innovation: chemical-based, isotope-based, and physics-based. Consequently, main techniques to be addressed operando will be: X-ray scattering, enhanced Raman, STEM-EELS & EDX, FIB-SIMS, Neutron imaging, OEMS and NMR. Parallelly, the consortium will integrate AI/Machine Learning support, in order to improve data acquisition and analysis, making the data crunching processes more efficient and meaningful. Likewise, data treatment and sharing are cornerstones of the project, as Open Science practices and scientific collaboration with the community are recognized by the consortium as key aspects of the BIG-MAP objectives of the Batteries partnership and 2030+ programmes. With a 36 month duration, the project is divided in 7 work packages distributed among the partners according to their expertise, with LIST as leader of the consortium. Dissemination, exploitation and communication activities will allow to maximize the impact of the results and the outreach of these, by actively promoting the diffusion of the information derived from the activities of the project.