Democratized innovation holds undeniable promise for European producers, but the integration with corporate innovation practices is in its infancy. While the interest is real, it is still neither easy or efficient for producers – especially SMEs to benefit from collaborative production. The iPRODUCE project takes well proven concepts and approaches (from DIY manufacturing, FabLabs, Makerspace), and aims to upscale them through innovative technology solutions and to install them in well-connected multi-stakeholder ecosystems under an umbrella concept of collaborative Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities (cMDF)”. We organize our work under a social-manufacturing platform that enables multi-stakeholder interactions and collaborations to support user-driven open-innovation and co-creation. At the heart of the iPRODUCE platform is an open digital space supported by a set of innovative tools that cover matchmaking, secure interactions, generative product design, process orchestration, agile prototyping, usability evaluations and lifecycle management. We complement these technical tools with a strong social component that aims at easing the notorious hardship of engagement with makers and aim to open up to new maker segments, while we improve on SoA tools for Lead User Innovation identification. The iPRODUCE platform will be deployed in six local ‘ecosystems’ which cover different levels of maturity with collaborative production, diverse objectives and application areas spanning from home furnishing, automotive/mobility, consumer photography, medical ecquipment and more. The platform supports knowledge and resource sharing across cMDFs and all our results will be monitored and evaluated.

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 project procure2innovate aims at improving institutional support for public procurers of information and communication technologies (ICT) and other product groups implementing innovation procurement by establishing or expanding competence centres for innovation procurement in ten EU Member States.