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.

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.

<< Background >>There is a significant social investment gap in Europe, in particular with regard to social care and support. The situation has only worsened with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many social care providers traditionally rely on public forms of investment and have more limited understanding of private investment. Similarly, private investors tend to not have a good understanding of social care and support. Universities do not have strong training programmes on social investment.<< Objectives >>The main project objective is to boost social investment in Europe by establishing a Knowledge Alliance that provides professional development opportunities to create more informed intersectoral working between investors and social care providers.<< Implementation >>By the end of the project, the a4i project has helped social care providers, private investors and higher education institutions to form a common understanding on social investment and develop training material; both online and face-to-face.<< Results >>The main results of the a4i project are - State of Play report on Social Investment, European Guidance on Social Investment- a universal professional development programme on social investment & transpositions in BE, CZ, ES; following pilots in the three countries involved- An online knowledge centre with a Massive Open Online Course (Universal & BE, CZ, ES), a list of promising practices, a mentor database and much more.

Drawing on practical situations that older people face in daily living, SMILE will create SMart Inclusive Living Environments (SLE) with novel eHealth solutions enabling ageing in place. There are 6 main objectives: 1. Identify the needs and preferences of older people while living in their home environments. 2. Undertake co-creation of easy to use digital solutions with older people and novel methods to involve people with dementia. 3. Develop a smart AI-based system (Digital Care Facilitator and Conversational Agent) to proactively support older people in daily living. 4. To provide acceptable digital solutions when these solutions are introduced into older peoples lives 5. Evaluate the SMILE package to assess replicability and scalability in enhancing living spaces supporting independent, active and socially inclusive living for older people. 6. Build Europe-Canada cooperation in replicating, scaling and extending the results of SMILE to benefit the very heterogeneous populations of older people in our societies. These objectives will be achieved by 3 workstreams based on trans disciplinary research: co-creative design and evaluation; digital care facilitator and conversational agent; SMILE SLE ecosystem and digital solutions. Our targeted breakthroughs for smart living environments supporting independent and active living are: a participatory SLE ecosystem model; the ‘Digital Care Facilitator’, an AI-based system [TRL6]; a conversational agent as an everyday intermediary enhancing social participation [TRL6]; personal mHealth apps, and eHealth monitors and devices [TRL5-8]. We will demonstrate that SMILE works for a very heterogeneous group with different needs and preferences: older people with severe dementia, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and care transitions during post-surgery recovery. With this combined package and related service improvements SMILE will go beyond state of the art in ways that are sustainable, scalable and exploitable.

In the medium to longer-term, the fiscal space that governments have to provide additional budgetary resources will shrink, including for healthcare. Our response is that it is better to pre-empt rather than repair i.e., to incentivise new ways of financing health promotion and disease prevention. The financing solution is smart capacitating investment. This means sharing risks and resources to invest at scale across multiple levels within health ecosystems generating sustainable returns and localised benefits. The specific objectives are: 1. Draw on available evidence to strengthen how smart capacitating investment is framed and communicated 2. Assess and enhance organisational readiness for testing SCI models in the regional test-beds 3. Develop and test business models that are compatible with smart capacitating investment 4. Develop and test novel finance models to determine which of the business models align with pre-defined contingencies for delivering smart capacitating investment 5. Develop and test a prototype collaborative platform for governing smart capacitating investment in health promotion and prevention. With an interdisciplinary approach we calibrate and harmonise 3 main work streams: developing functional prototype models of the anchoring concept (smart capacitating investment) [WP2-4]; iterative testing in real world environments (ES,DE,SE,UK initially with an Open Call for a 2nd tranche of transition and less developed regions) to show relevance in tax and insurance-based systems [WP5-6]; preparing a social franchising package for large-scale demonstration [WP7]. Underpinning these workstreams, we will also explore and test platform-based collaborative spaces for the involvement of resourced citizen panels and local communities in planning and investment decisions for interventions and services. The project generates concrete outcomes and impacts for further development and uptake of smart capacitating investment that disrupts state-of-the-art.