This action shall provide specialized consulting services addressing innovation management capacity to SMEs with significant innovation activities. Beneficiaries of the SME instrument will receive support to enhance their innovation management and advice about the coaching process. The most innovative SME within the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y León and Galicia will receive and advanced innovation assessment based on the Improve tool and an action plan to fulffill the gaps.

The vision of FutureFoodS is to collectively achieve environmentally-friendly, socially secure, fair and economically viable healthy and safe Food Systems (FS) for Europe. FutureFoodS gather 87 partners from 22 EU Member States, 6 Associated Countries and 1 third country. FutureFoodS includes public and private actors, policy makers, foundations, locally, sub-nationally, nationally, EU-widely. All these FutureFoodS partners are fully aligned on the vision for the Partnership and the methodology for its implementation in line with SDG17 and EU Green Deal components. This vision has been broken down into general (GO), specific (SO) and operational (OO) objectives applying across the 4 R&I areas and 4 transversal activities identified by the FutureFoods consortium in its stable draft Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) which constitutes the strategic backbone of the project. The four GO cover: GO1 - Functioning of FS; GO2 - System approaches; GO3 - Inclusive government; GO4 - Co-creation cases. These GO have then been translated into SO prioritised in line with the timescale and resources of the Partnership: SO1 - Change the way we eat; SO2- Change the way we process and supply food, SO3 - Change the way we connect with FSs and SO4 - Change the way we govern FS. In addition, 6 interconnected OO have been set: OO1- Pooling R&I resources and programming; OO2 - Operational FS Observatory; OO3 - Active FS knowledge Hub of FS Labs; OO4 - Functioning knowledge sharing and scaling mechanisms; OO5- Revisiting the SRIA; OO6 - Promoting, supporting, widening & gathering FS various communities. The objectives implemented in the 8 WPs of FutureFoodS will exert impact directly or indirectly in most of the destinations of Horizon Europe’s Cluster 6 2023-2024 work programme and particularly for the topic destination ‘Fair, healthy and environment-friendly FS from primary production to consumption’ echoing to the main EU and World FS policies & strategies.

Europe is facing major economic challenges that require an ambitious economic policy for the 21st century. The EU has set out its vision for Europe's social market economy in the Europe 2020 strategy, which aims at confronting our structural weaknesses through progress in three mutually reinforcing priorities : • smart growth, based on knowledge and innovation, • sustainable growth, promoting a more resource efficient, greener and competitive economy, • inclusive growth, fostering a high employment economy delivering economic, social and territorial cohesion. MANUNET III, as a continuation of MANUNET II, is aligned with the European priorities and pretends to create a smart sustainable growth in the European manufacturing sector by coordinating the research and innovation efforts in the field of advanced manufacturing with a special focus in the key areas of new production processes, adaptive manufacturing systems and technologies for the factory of the future. The project will also reinforce the territorial cohesion through an extended collaboration network. The consortium pretends to respond to the actual economic crisis by promoting the transnational research, innovation and entrepreneurship in the industrial sector, especially in the SMEs, which are the backbone of Europe's economy. Through this strategic and integrated approach to innovation in advanced manufacturing, MANUNET III pretends to maximise European, national and regional research and innovation potential.

M-ERA.NET 3 aims at coordinating the research efforts in the participating EU Member States, Regions, and Associated States in materials research and innovation, including materials for future batteries, to support the circular economy and Sustainable Development Goals. A large network of national and regional funding organisations from 25 EU Members States, 4 Associated States and 6 countries outside Europe will implement a series of annual joint calls to fund excellent innovative transnational RTD cooperation, including one call for proposals with EU co-funding and additional non-cofunded calls. Continuing the activities started under the predecessor project M-ERA.NET 2 (3/2016-2/2021), the M-ERA.NET 3 consortium will address emerging technologies and related applications areas, such as - for example- surfaces, coatings, composites, additive manufacturing or integrated materials modelling. Research on materials supporting the large scale research initiative on future battery technologies will be particularly highlighted as a main target of the cofunded call (Call 2021) with a view to supporting in particular SDG 7 (“Affordable and clean energy”) by enabling electro mobility through sustainable energy storage technology and SDG 9 (“Industrial innovation and infrastructure”) by enhancing scientific research and upgrading the technological capabilities of industrial sectors. Several relevant action plans and initiatives will serve as programmatic guides for M-ERA.NET 3 when defining the joint activities, such as the Circular Economy Action Plan, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the EC communication “A clean planet for all”, and the “European Green Deal”. The total mobilised public call budget is expected to reach 150 million € with additional private investment of 50 million €. Thus, the leverage effect of the EU contribution will reach a factor of 13, exceeding by far the minimum required factor of 5.

Excellent EU programs push health R&I but are not sufficient. Synergy with strategic initiatives in MS and a new model for impactful collaborations are needed to address the challenges for health. ERA4Health brings the opportunity to increase EU transnational collaborative research funding by creating a funding body for joint programming in priority areas addressing EU Public Health Needs, with total duration of 7 years. ERA4Health focuses on tackling diseases and reducing disease burden and the following challenges: 1) the increasing demand for a better quality of life and a better care of patients, 2) the need to transform public health care systems in more effective, efficient, equitable, accessible, and resilient ones and 3) the need to strengthen disease prevention and health promotion. In this view, ERA4Health objectives are: .SO1- Support relevant medical research including clinical fields and intervention areas (prevention, diagnosis, treatment) .SO2- Improve the utilisation of existing health technologies in clinical practice .SO3- Build capacity, in particular in conducting Investigator Initiated Clinical Studies at EU scale .SO4- Implement and advance the practice of RRI across the breadth of the programme ERA4Heatlth will be implemented in 2 phases: . Phase 1 (2 years) will implement joint calls focused on nutrition and lifestyle-related diseases, cardiovascular diseases and nanomedicine (4 in two years). In parallel, it will establish a supporting framework to overcome the challenges in launching international IICSs joint calls. . Phase 2, if the EC approves it: additional multinational calls for IICSs and joint calls for other priority areas will be launched in accordance with the decision of the Health Programme Committee taken at the end of previous Phase 34 partners (20 from EU, 3 Third Countries associated to HE and 2 non-associated, non EU), will commit 90,510,000€, during the 3 first years, as financial support to third parties.