Rural areas and agriculture are facing major economic, social and environmental challenges regarding climate change, biodiversity loss and water supply. As a consequence, there is a need for new or improved innovative business and production models in rural areas that tackle these challenges and have impact on sustainability, both upstream and downstream of their business. NEXRUR´s main objective is to investigate the innovation dynamics and strategies for change in rural areas, through international cooperation between the EU and China, enabling farmers and their communities to develop, select and upscale new or improved sustainable business models and monitor their economic, social and environmental impact on rural resilience. The project is addressed to the Area A of the topic. NEXRUR will generate new knowledge on community-led agricultural business models, bringing together conceptual with practical research, thereby contributing to the generation of a knowledge base and facilitating co-design and co-innovation in a network of 22 diverse community cases (15 in the EU and 7 in China) and 7 selected start-up cases (5 in the EU and 2 in China) based on sustainability performance criteria. Besides, NEXRUR will verify the social and environmental performance of community-led agricultural businesses in different contexts, agri-food value chains, pedoclimatic zones and socioeconomic and environmental conditions in the EU and China. NEXRUR´s results comprise a summary of tested and improved pathways, strategies, tools and policy recommendations for the successful community-led businesses model development. Both the new knowledge generated and a monitoring framework for agricultural businesses and associated tool focused on environmental and social KPIs derived from the project, will be widely disseminated in the EU and China inspiring the uptake of new or improved production activities able to increase the prosperity of farmers.

The CHERRIES consortium, consisting of 12 renowned and EU-FP experienced universities, research organisations, SMEs, CSOs, healthcare organisations incl. a private hospital, business and innovation centres and regional authorities from seven European countries. The CHERRIES model will support healthcare research and innovation policy and pilot actions by interlinking RRI, demand-side policy and territorial innovation models incl. smart specialisation. This pilot innovation process will be implemented and tested in the territories of Murcia (ES), Örebro (SW) and the Republic of Cyprus (CY). Subsequently, three additional Mirror territories will be supported in adopting the CHERRIES model. The model applies RRI methods in the innovation process, not only contributing to more innovative territorial environments but also to more suitable single innovations that therefore have a higher chance of being widely adopted and establish them successfully on the market. With this innovative design processes, the project contributes to more open, transparent and democratic R&I systems in the engaged territories and beyond, creating societal, democratic, environmental, economic and scientific impacts as well as tackling transformation processes of the organisations involved.

The FUNDCELERATOR project will aim at developing a new fund raising support methodology targeting innovative and high-growth potential SMEs operating in markets characterized by long time-to-market paths (typically more than 3 years, such as in biotech, medical devices, materials, cleantech, aeronautics, etc.). Based on their respective experience, knowledge and already developed fund raising support tools and methodologies, the 4 involved innovation support organizations will make use of the “Twinning advanced” methodological approach to collaboratively build and test an improved fund raising acceleration support programme dedicated to the target group SMEs, relying also, in a systemic mode, on all the existing fund raising support services provided by other regional private or public stakeholders. As part of the project, the regional innovation support agency from Aquitaine (ADI, France), the Baden-Württemberg regional innovation and business support organization (BWCON, Germany), the Dublin Business & Innovation Centre (DUBLIN BIC, Ireland) and the regional business and innovation incubator from Murcia (CEEIM, Spain) will experiment the new enhanced fund raising support methodology and evaluate its performance and impacts on beneficiaries (adequacy to their needs, service quality and efficiency) while beginning to apply and to test the new approach with 8 to 10 SMEs (at least 2 per partner). As a result, the new improved fund raising support methodology will be documented in a Design Option Paper (DOP), as a guide to be disseminated into other innovation support organisations, helping them at implementing the new designed programme, providing them recommendations, returns on experience and performance results.

SARA project aims at improving the support provided to female SME innovation processes by testing and developing a new model in the innovation ecosystem. In Europe, there are 23 million SMEs with an average loss of 3.1% in turnover due to low liquidity and a lack of innovative products. Women make up 52 % of the total European population but only 34.4 % of the European Union (EU) self-employed and 30 % of start-up entrepreneurs. Innovation Agencies strive at keeping the pace of SME innovation support demand, but their programs are not gender-oriented. Starting from the main idea “It takes a village to raise a child” (African proverb that means that an entire community of people must interact with children to grow in a safe and healthy environment), SARA will develop a new model to support Innovation Agencies in better gender-oriented activities. SARA responds to Europe's indications to develop and test a model for smart villages (accessibility, sustainability, new entrepreneurship), and it supports the co-design of new tools for female entrepreneurship by involving smart villages as an unusual place to create innovative enterprises for a better work-balance. Through this, promoting new forms of innovation and entrepreneurship proactively as suggested by the call “for a better innovation to SMEs”, Work Program 2018-2020. The project will use the peer learning methodology promoted by the INNOSUP-05-2018-2020 (Twinning) involving several regional innovation agencies with complementary skills. The partners will exchange knowledge and experience and develop appropriate local case studies (achieving a "learning by doing" process). The joint work of the project partners together with peer learning will produce a Design Options Paper for the implementation of local initiatives to develop a " Smart Villages an unusual place for women entrepreneurship " and related innovation support services and will promote an improvement in the role of Innovation Agency more gender-oriented.

The objectives of the project „job developer: from job creation to competence development“ was to set impulses in the reduction of the high unemployment in Europe by adapting vocational educational training and career counselling in the EU to the labour markets‘ conditions and requirements in the respective countries.These activities of adaptation are achieved by the education/training of so-called „job developers“, who identify the qualification requirements in cooperation with youths and young adults to create new employment opportunities, and work out a plan for individual professional development. This was achieved with the means of the application of the instruments „employment radar“ and „talent diagnosis“ – resp. the country-specific adaptation of these instruments – developed by SHS/minipreneurs GBM. Young adults were encouraged and enabled by the support and under the tutelage of a skilled/trained „job developer“ to detect employment opportunities, to create jobs on their own as well as to deduce the respective dimensions of requirements by analyzing the local employment opportunities on the one hand, and their interest, knowledge, and skills on the other hand. By comparing the qualification requirements with the present talents as well as the local training opportunities, on the one hand further trainings may be advised and on the other hand gaps in the existing training programmes may be identified.Thus, the project renders it possible to adapt training activities with (local) labour-market trends in an early stage and specific way and to achieve a lasting change effect. This may be effected i. a. by the adaption of curricula in the vocational training and development as well as by career counselling. At the same time, the participants gain first practical learning experience in the field of self-employment especially by the trend and market analysis in the context of the employment radar and by a subsequent expert hearing.The project’s core was to qualify the staff in the acquired partner organizations in Hungary, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria and Lithuania as multipliers and thus to enable them to provide necessary structures for the concept’s adaptation and implementation. With their expertise and as coordinators of the local activities, the partners essentially contribute to the project’s success. In Hungary and Bulgaria, the chamber of commerce, and in Lithuania the Chamber of foreign Trade were won as project partners. In Greece, a research firm as well as a business consultancy and in Spain the European Business Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship were attracted as partners. Besides, in addition to the Institute for Work Science (IAW) at the Ruhr University of Bochum, the SHS/minipreneurs GBM also participated as a German para-partner.They had developed the concept of the employment radar and the talent diagnosis and supervised the initiated qualification, adaptation and implementation of the concept by the European partners as experts.In the first step, one to two persons per partner country were trained in the context of the kick-off-meeting and a five-day multiplier training in the fields of the concept’s transfer and adaptation. On the basis of all project activities, the consortium additionally worked out a series of intellectual outputs that shall be applied beyond the project and will be accessible to third parties and thus contribute to the project’s effectiveness and sustainability. This comprises on the one hand the translated documents concerning the application of the concept and the respective publicity materials, and on the other hand the further development of the employment radar and its potential and resistance analysis that yield to country-specific conditions. In addition, five modules were developed and evaluated, whose completion ensues a qualification as a „job developer“. This qualification as a „job developer“ shall be established as a recognised certification programme in the each EU country. The modules‘ contents comprise basic social skills, i.e. competences which are necessary for leadership and the encouragement of encounter groups, the creation of an employment radar including the implementation of a talent diagnosis, digital competences field of social media for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial creativity , and cultural mindfulness and Cooperation, especially networking for entrepreneurs.In all, by the training of multipliers, by the qualification as a „job developer“, who did not actually exist in this form before, and by the local implementation as well as the development of intellectual outputs, the project will contribute to means of creating new jobs involving the promotion of educational training and career counselling matching with the current trends on the labour markets.