5TOI_4EWAS project will focus on Targeted Open Innovation in energy, water and agriculture societal challenges through a balanced innovation-friendly ecosystem in the Southern Mediterranean Neighborhood (SMN) based on quintuple helix and NEXUS approach. The project will enhance and support regional smart specialization and development by increasing research capacity, effective mobility of young innovators/researchers and shared knowledge to improve their participation in the EU research area. It will contribute to the establishment of favorable and stable conditions for international cooperation and the set-up of a Common Knowledge and Innovation Space of specialization in the SMN for a real socio-economic impact, based on co-ownership and mutual benefits. Our partnership ensures coherence and complementarity with past and on-going regional EU-MPC cooperation initiatives and existing bilateral S&T Agreements. The project allows easily building of synergies among several ongoing initiatives thanks to the established Think Tanks Network of Science Counselors in the MPC area and the observatory of current initiatives. In this way, the project will seek continuous complementarity and coherence with the activities of the Strategic Forum for International Cooperation to enhance the cooperation and close synergies through the involvement of the widest possible range of stakeholders, from funding agencies, research organizations, industry to civil society. Therefore an enhanced and more reliable definition of the priority setting mechanisms in the region from an innovation point of view is expected. Through these activities and by the definition of a Join Action Plan, the project will effectively use the science diplomacy and facilitates the identification of remaining obstacles, conflicts for cooperation and support the R&I bilateral policy dialogue addressing sensitive challenges between EU and MPC through the dialogue and coordination platform that will be created..

The wine market has changed dramatically in the last fifty years, moving from small national markets, scarcely spread and limited to specialists, to the globalized web revolution. Wine industry represents an important part of both agriculture and food industry in many countries (i.e ES, FR and IT represent alone a total of 32% of world vineyard surface area, being within top 5 world producers of grapes in 2018). However, wine industry is threatened by counterfeit products and illicit trades. The overall research and technology development goal of TRACEWINDU is to improve productivity of vineyards by using novel combination of Plant Protection Products while simultaneously geographic origin analysis is integrated in a multi-approach strategy to ensure wine traceability/authentication. Such approach will be correlated with the obtained outputs of sensory analysis to generate a labelling score chart data in form of product passport included in smart tags. The smart tag are physical labels with unique item-level identifiers in form of QR codes for digital and dynamic information sharing and provisioning of all relevant product information throughout product’s lifecycle, and transparency of product data facilitating decentralized blockchain technology. Through implemented smart tags, TRACEWINDU supports tracing bottles back directly to producer and each time a bottle changes hands, the origin is updated, and ownership is transferred, and those bottles certified at the time and place of production, by producers will carry even more value in secondary markets. Overall, TRACEWINDU aims to foster, improve and develop permanent international and inter-sector collaboration between academic research centers and private sector, enhancing the exchange of knowledge, best practices, know-how, innovations, experience, mutual cooperation and culture of work at different regions and countries (ES, FR, IT, ME, RS, AR) through a series of scheduled secondments.