Category: Regional potential, bioeconomy strategies and action plans

 TRADEIT project

 TRADEIT project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Objective

The TRADEIT project is a multidisciplinary, multi-sectorial collaborative project supporting a Network of Traditional Food SMEs and Food Researchers in the areas of Collaboration, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Knowledge and Technology Transfer to increase the competitiveness and inter-regional advantage of Traditional Food Producing SMEs. This will be achieved through focused regional coordination and support activities and events facilitated by the establishment of 9 Regional Traditional Food Knowledge and Technology Transfer Hubs. Each Hub will host a TRADEIT stakeholder sub-network (defined by region, language and/or food group), the members of which will benefit from a suite of knowledge and technology offerings over the course of the project. Food researchers from across Europe will be provided with the opportunity to attend the TRADEIT Entrepreneurial Summer School in which an entrepreneurial skillset will be developed to facilitate future R&D&I Enterprise and Commercialisation activities. The regional focus of the project will be further developed in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda which will promote regional R&D&I for pan-European benefit. The TRADEIT project aligns with, and contributes to, the goals and objective of a number of EU Initiatives, Strategies and Policies including Europe 2020 the Innovation Union Flagship Initiative, Horizon 2020, Cohesion Policy in particular Smart Specialisation Innovating for Sustainable Growth: a Bio-economy for Europe and Food Law Regulation

Contacts: Helena McMahon
helena.mcmahon@staff.ittralee.ie

Website

 RUBIZMO project

 RUBIZMO project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

RUBIZMO will identify business models with high potential for empowering rural communities to take advantage of the opportunities arising from improved value chain optimisation. It will directly supporting the creation of sustainable jobs and growth in rural economies, supporting a multi-actor approach for generation of shared-value. Ultimately, the project looks to contribute to rural development in Europe, supporting the Europe 2020 Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, as well as supporting Regional and Rural Development policy.

To do this, the project will identify innovative business models (developed or identified in existing projects under FP7, H2020, Interreg, Central Europe, etc.) with a significant potential to support modernisation and sustainable growth in rural economies, and relevant to the food sector, bio-based value chains and ecosystem services. Business models with the potential to contribute to the modernisation and sustainable growth of rural economies will be selected, packaged and classified according to their nature, comprising technologies, services, business support structures, financing mechanisms, etc.

This will result in the creation of four practical, user-oriented tools:
– Virtual library of business cases, to inspire and inform potential entrepreneurs about business opportunities;
– Guidelines on creating favourable conditions for the deployment of innovative business models, to help public authorities and rural networks create adequate framework conditions for rural innovation;
– Toolkit for clustering and network development in rural areas;
– Transformation support tool, to help individual entrepreneurs understand which business models are best adapted to their situation, and how to go about implementing change.

The project will then prepare Europe-wide upscaling and replication in rural areas using real life cases, taking account of the complexity of transferring value chains.

Contacts: Justin Casimir: justin.casimir@ri.se
Daniel Lissoni d.lissoni@greenovate-europe.eu

Website

Virtual Library

Youtube channel

 POWER4BIO project

 POWER4BIO project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

POWER4BIO project aims at empowering regional stakeholders to boost the transition towards bioeconomy regions in Europe by providing them with the necessary tools, instruments and guidance to develop and implement sound sustainable bioeconomy strategies. In particular, POWER4BIO will define a methodology based on a 3-steps approach (stakeholders engagement, regional analysis and strategy development) to guide European regions when preparing and reviewing their regional bioeconomy strategy and its associated implementation plan (roadmap), and which will be ultimately integrated in a Bioregional Strategy Accelerator Toolkit.

POWER4BIO will also develop a catalogue of bio-based business models, including best practice examples, to support regions understand, identify and select the most adequate bio-based solutions for developing their bioeconomy and; POWER4BIO will issue recommendations to use and align the main funding instruments and policies in Europe to support bioeconomy business models.

Moreover, POWER4BIO will rely on a comprehensive programme to foster mutual learning and intra- and interregional collaboration and networking among regional stakeholders to ensure knowledge transfer across sectors and regions and to jointly develop and complement different sustainable bioeconomy value chains within 10 participant regions member of the consortium (5 of which coming from Central and Eastern Europe) from 9 different countries.

Finally, POWER4BIO will design and deliver an ambitious training programme to increase the skills and capacity of the regional stakeholders in several important aspects of the bioeconomy (sustainability in the bio-based value chains, synergies in funding instruments, technology transfer and entrepreneurship, etc.). All in all, the potential brought in the project is huge, considering that the 10 participant regions represent a population of around 88 million people, a GDP of 2460 billion EUR and an area of almost 450,000 km2.

Contacts: Ignacio Martin: imartin@fcirce.es 
Christine Beusch: beusch@e-p-c.de

Website

 Interreg MED Green Growth community

 Interreg MED Green Growth community

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Within the framework of the Interreg MED Programme, Green Growth is a thematic community promoting green and circular economy in the Mediterranean region by enhancing cross-sectoral innovation practices through an integrated and territorially-based cooperation approach. Since 2016, the Green Growth Community (GGC) have involved 165 partners from 13 Euro-Mediterranean countries in 14 innovation projects working on four focus areas:

  • food systems
  • eco-innovation
  • smart cities
  • waste management

The GGC supports its projects in knowledge sharing, communication and capitalisation efforts in order to increase their impact at market and policy levels. The GGC produces unified results and knowledge that are transferred and capitalized to key stakeholders in the Mediterranean region and beyond. It is thereby contributing to achieve the targets of the EU Green Deal and the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) labelled the community in October 2019, acknowledging its potential to support the transition to a green and circular economy and to deliver concrete benefits to the citizens of the Mediterranean region. Since November 2020, the GGC is a member of the Coordination Group of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ECESP).

 

Contacts: Mercè Boy Roura, merce.boy@uvic.cat

Green Growth website 

Capitalisation platform

 

 

 ISAAC project

 ISAAC project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Objective

Although Italy has a great potential for biogas production, many non-technical barriers are still present in the current framework. Some of the limiting factors involve public acceptance of the biogas facilities diffusion, as well as lack of a reliable coordination between different stakeholders. Furthermore, normative and legislative inadequacies and deficiencies haven’t facilitated the implementation of these technologies within the national context.
The main project objective consists on the construction of a communicative model oriented to spread balanced information, based on environmental and economic benefits, between all the actors potentially involved in biogas/biomethane implementation. At the same time, actions will be focused on reducing the fragmentation between farmers, foresters and other stakeholders in order to reach the minimal facility dimension needed, increased biogas and biomethane penetration and reduce cost management.
A participatory process model will be developed as the main project’s approach to reduce social conflict and to include all actors in important common decision making process; starting from the experience, a normative proposal on the participatory process will be recommended.
The effectiveness of the proposal will be maximized applying the actions on specific and restricted areas: the study of the energetic unhatched potential deriving from anaerobic digestion of residual biomass or organic waste will constitute the starting point for communication and information campaigns toward the territory and its stakeholders. The attention will be focused on some high energetic potential regions where the diffusion of these technologies struggles to be realized and the effects of project actions on awareness and acceptance will be evaluated.
In particular, a specific decisional participative model will be implemented and applied in one of the selected districts, as case study, involving in an active way all the stakeholders.

Contacts: Azzeroco2: ricerca@azzeroco2.it

Website

 ICT BIOCHAIN project

 ICT BIOCHAIN project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

ICT-BIOCHAIN is a project aiming to promote the adoption of ICT, IoT and industry 4.0. solutions to improve the efficiency of biomass value chains. In order to achieve this, it developed a platform to connect stakeholders in the bio-based industry with ICT providers, and it established two Digital Innovation Hubs, located in ready-made, test-bed bioeconomy regions: South-East Ireland and Andalusia (Spain). Leading experts and support networks developed region-specific bio-resource data models and provided access within these hubs to best practices, expert knowledge, and information.

Contacts: Ana I. Martinez: anamartinez@sustainableinnovations.eu  and info@ictbiochain.eu

Website

 GO-GRASS project

 GO-GRASS project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Grasslands are important for land use in Europe, covering more than a third of the European agricultural area. Grasslands are also diverse in terms of management, yield and biodiversity value, providing forage and other key resources for Europe’s livestock sector. The EU-funded GO-GRASS project will create new opportunities in rural areas based on grassland and green fodder. These will be tested in four EU regions at small scale to ensure wide replication. Within a circular system, the project will develop business models that are circular, sustainable and suitable for remote areas with unexploited resources. The GO-GRASS consortium comprises a multidisciplinary team of 22 partners from 8 European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Sweden).

Contacts: Philipp Grundmann (coordinator): go-grass@atb-potsdam.de
Natalie Höppner (communication & dissemination): nah@esci.eu

Website

 GoDanuBio project

 GoDanuBio project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Danube regions and cities face major societal challenges regarding demographic change and brain drain. Rural exodus, loss of opportunities for youth and territorial imbalances are only the tip of the iceberg. However, Danube regions can make a change. A new beginning is possible through multi-level governance and stronger institutional capacities.

The bioeconomy potential of the Danube macro-region is vast. GoDanuBio advocates for the circular bioeconomy as a main tool to revitalize rural areas and establish rural-urban synergies from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. A way ahead is bioeconomising[1] clusters landscapes and value chains, and shaping innovation ecosystems. GoDanuBio inherits the results of DanuBioValNet project (2017-2019) and with a wider thematic scope focuses on participative governance and mutual learning to unleash transformation.

[1] The full deployment of the bioeconomy potential lies in the engagement and participation of all related-industries and stakeholders through the bio-based value chains. Missing gaps should be identified and integrated.

Contacts: Sergi Costa (Coordinator): costa@bio-pro.de

Teodora Atanasova (Communication): teodora.atanasova@brait.bg

Website

 ENABLING project

 ENABLING project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

ENABLING is the initiative of 16 partners in 13 EU and associated (IL, NO) countries. The main goal is to support the spreading of best practices and innovation in the provision (production, pre-processing) of biomass for the BBI (Bio-Based Industry).

In particular, ENABLING aims at creating appropriate conditions for the development of efficient biomass to BBPs (Bio-Based Products and Processes) value chains.

The consortium’s vision is that Europe bears a huge potential for optimising the supply of biomass into innovative bio-based processes and products.

Upscaling biomass production and pre-processing, and combining streams towards the BBPs with those of more traditional bioenergy chains would enhance at least three interlinked types of impact. a) biomass production gains scale to meet higher demand in both sectors (bioenergy and the BBI); b) the reinforcement of biomass supply for the BBI benefits smaller BBI players, helping them diversify and consolidate biomass input sources; c) reinforcing the biomass and BBPs linkages may contribute to job-creation, due to the increased need for specialised workers.

To realise such potential, ENABLING also anticipates its longer term exploitation pathways. In the intention of the consortium, the project should aggregate and engage partners for the establishment of a permanent innovation brokerage platform, likely to become in the future, one of the main marketplaces and innovation transfer accelerators at European level.

In this sense, the project organises its work around two building blocks: one relates to animating the stakeholders (on the farming and BBPs sides), identifying best practices, turning them into easy to access content (in the EIP format) for their potential users and providing stakeholders with coaching and guidance on innovation. The other one looks at future developments, with the consolidation, in a self-sustainable way, of the innovation brokerage platforms after the end of the EU funded initiative.

Contacts: Zusepe Elias Zidda: zusepe.zidda@euknow.eu

Website

 Danube S3 Cluster

 Danube S3 Cluster

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

The Danube Transnational Programme is a financing instrument of the European Territorial Cooperation (ETC), better known as Interreg. ETC is one of the goals of the European Union cohesion policy and provides a framework for the implementation of joint actions and policy exchanges between national, regional and local actors from different Member States.

The Danube Transnational Programme (DTP) promotes economic, social and territorial cohesion in the Danube Region through policy integration in selected fields.

In order to achieve a higher degree of territorial integration of the very heterogeneous Danube region, the transnational cooperation programme acts as a policy driver and pioneer to tackle common challenges and needs in specific policy fields where transnational cooperation is expected to deliver tangible results.

Considering its geographical coverage, this highly complex programme provides a political dimension to transnational cooperation which is unique in Europe, successfully facing challenges such as ensuring good mechanisms to contract partners who receive funding from different EU instruments.

The Danube Transnational Programme finances projects for the development and practical implementation of policy frameworks, tools and services and concrete small-scale pilot investments. Strong complementarities with the broader EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) are sought.

Contacts: Gilda Niculescu: programe@adrmuntenia.ro

Website