The key challenge addressed by the PEOPLE project is the skills mismatch between sociology, psychology and anthropology graduates across Europe and the requirements of the industry. This affects the job satisfaction and wages of graduates, while at the same time diminishing the productivity and innovative potential of companies. The situation is exacerbated by the failure of society at large and the business world in particular to understand how young people educated in the above-mentioned fields could contribute towards improving products, services and processes or by driving innovation in rapidly evolving technology areas. The qualification mismatch and relatively high unemployment rate of young graduates prevents countries from realising the full potential of their labour force and to some extent also leaves young graduates unfulfilled. At the core of the project is the idea that understanding people should become an indispensable part of industrial development processes, as a means to achieve practical-based education as well as new categories of products, services, or business strategies that truly address people’s needs and lead to sustainable innovation. The key innovative contribution of the PEOPLE project is the development and implementation of People-centred Learning Cycles (PLC) as a novel pedagogical approach and model. PLCs take a learner-centred and real problem-based teaching and learning approach, bringing together students, university educators, business professionals, and users/community members. These interdisciplinary teams work on actual business and societal challenges and jointly co-create and test new or improved solutions for challenging issues in the area of sustainable living and energy efficiency. These solutions are tailored to the needs of users and communities and lead to innovation in the business sector (in product, service, and/or process). PLCs are based on the following beyond state-of-the-art principles: (1) interdisciplinary and essentially collaborative: bringing together different disciplines and expertise, where engineering works hand in hand with social sciences and humanities. The key guiding principle is “dare to see things from other perspectives than your own”;(2) multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder: involving industry professionals, university teachers and representatives of civil society and non-governmental organizations;(3) people as co-creators: involved in all stages of product and service development process;(4) rooted in ethnography: as a methodology to collect, analyse and understand data and generate in-depth insights about peoples’ behaviours, practices, and needs; (5) in dialogue with theory and bringing up ethical considerations: understanding bigger contexts of emerging futures and world’s challenges.To ensure long-term sustainability of results and cooperation activities, the PEOPLE project has developed 5 key sustainability strategies:(1) Integration of PEOPLE learning cycle methodology in existing/new study programmes of university partners.(2) Implementing new PEOPLE case studies with existing or new partners on national/regional basis.(3) PEOPLE community and PEOPLE ambassadors.(4) Specialized trainings and consultancy on “How to make your own PEOPLE project”.(5) PEOPLE as part of larger initiatives to influence policy developments at national and European levels.

Data Centres (DC) are among the largest yet increasing energy consumers, due to the rising digitization of human activities. RES integration and energy efficiency improvements have the potential to reduce significantly DC carbon footprint, while increasing at the same time the auto-consumed energy, thus improving DC security and resiliency of supply against climate change. However, very few solutions, despite validated in lab, have been successfully deployed on operational DCs, mostly due to technological fragmentation, excessive CAPEX and lack of appropriate business models. CATALYST will address these challenges through turning existing/new DCs into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in RES and energy efficiency by offering mutualized flexibility services to the smart energy grids (both electricity and heat grids). By leveraging on the outcomes of FP7 GEYSER and DOLPHIN projects, CATALYST will adapt, scale up, validate and deploy an innovative, adaptable technological and business framework aimed at i) exploiting available DC non-IT legacy assets (onsite RES/backup generation, UPS/batteries, cooling system thermal inertia, heat pump for waste heat reuse) to deliver simultaneous energy flexibility services to multi-energy coupled electricity/heat/IT load marketplaces ii) deploying Cross-DC cross-infrastructures (e.g. heat vs IT) IT workload orchestration, by combining heat-demand driven HPC geographical workload balancing, with traceable ICT-load migration between federated DCs to match IT demands with time-varying on-site RES (“follow the energy approach”) iii) providing marketplace-as-a-service tools to nurture novel ESCO2.0 business models. The adaptation and replication potential of CATALYST will be demonstrated through carrying out four different real life trials spanning through the full spectrum of DCs types (fully distributed DCs, HPC, co-location, legacy) and architectures (from large centralized versus decentralized micro-DCs).