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.