Future Proof is a novel knowledge exchange and co-design platform that uses foresight and scenario planning methodologies to co-develop novel innovation services for SMEs. It will take into account the rapid and complex changes of the world in order to use suitable methods and technologies that will respond to the future needs of our SME clients. The three innovation agencies of the Future Proof consortium, have worked for almost three decades with clients providing innovation support services. Numerous clients and participants in seminars and workshops have raised the question that caught our attention: ‘How do you compete successfully in this endlessly changing world? During the last decades colossal changes have radically changed the innovation environment and the business arena. Digitalization, sharing economy, automation, the rise of China, climate change are only few of the drivers that have created new risks, opportunities and challenges for both the SMEs and the innovation agencies. Nevertheless, SMEs and innovation agencies have done little to change their traditional modus operandi, thus facing serious difficulties to address current and future challenges. Innovation agencies for the last 3 decades are basically offering the same bouquet of services while the same applies for the available innovation SME support programs. Considering the above overall objective of the Future-Proof project is threefold: (i) To utilise strategic foresight methodologies for designing new services and/or programs that will respond to the future needs of our SME clients. (ii) To exchange best-practices in designing and implementing foresight related services to SMEs that will create high-performance resilient future-proof SMEs. (iii) To broadly communicate the project outputs to the European innovation ecosystem.

Significant advances in Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies, commonly known as 3D printing, over the past decade have transformed the ways in which products are designed, developed, manufactured, and distributed. This poses new challenges for SMEs, especially in terms of becoming aware of the benefits of AM, as well as acquiring new skills and personnel. While withstanding such transformations, according to the European Commission, public innovation agencies strive at keeping the pace of SME innovation support demand, and seek opportunities to implement programmes pivoted on new approaches. At the same time, new innovation support programs leveraging on Open Innovation working models such as Innovation Prizes and hackathons (a.k.a. Innovation Challenges) has been piloted throughout Europe, gaining evidence for improving SMEs awareness of benefits of novel technologies and innovation methodologies. Project INNOADDITIVE aims at improving the knowledge and know-how of innovation agencies about successful support initiatives that proved to impact on the adoption of Additive Manufacturing technologies in SMEs. A special focus will be given to track initiatives adopting innovative and lean formats of Innovation Challenges. This will be done by tracking existing initiatives in the field (in the three partnering regions and beyond), and then sharing relevant know-how during three peer learning workshops organized by the three project partners, and targeting an audience of innovation professionals. Ultimately, the project will deliver an actionable Guide on how to design novel Innovation Challenges capable of accelerating the adoption of Additive Manufacturing technologies by SMEs.

Regional public authorities plan the territorial innovation policies, regional innovation support agencies design and/or implement innovation support programmes for SMEs in accordance with the innovation policies, monitor and evaluate the programmes outcomes, promote and manage regional innovation ecosystems, i.e. innovation-friendly environments. InnoMedia is ultimately a peer learning action for three innovation support agencies of three different European countries about policies, programmes, tools and services for SME innovation, which aims at enhancing the effectiveness of regional development policies and contribute to the transformation of knowledge into new products and services, innovative and attractive for the market.

The EFFECT-SME project’s main objective is to enhance the quality of start-ups’/SMEs’ innovation support programmes through the development of an efficient and effective methodology assessing the impact of the support programmes on start-ups/SMEs. Assessment of the effectiveness of start-ups’/SMEs’ supporting measures and adaptation of lessons learned into the modification of current start-up/SME support programmes is the key aspect to continuous improvement of support and the policy itself. The aim of the project is to achieve improved, targeted and more efficient support to start-ups and SMEs. The project partners will share own approaches to complete them with relevant desk research outputs, developing new topics and approaches to more effective monitoring and evaluation and to put the new impact methodology into practice. The project consortium will apply Twinning+ methodology via 3 peer learning interactive workshops focused on impact evaluation of start-up/SME support programmes from different perspectives of 3 partners – combining different levels of experience, methodology approaches and balanced geographic scope: Czechia (MSIC), Germany (S2i) and Spain (Madri+d). The desk research on available methodologies will complete the peer-learning of the partners. The Design Option Paper (DOP) on efficient impact evaluation will stand for the key deliverable of the project. The innovative methodology will be disseminated through numerous business support networks for further exploitation by innovation agencies (IA) in Europe. Project duration: 3/2021 – 2/2022 Budget: 50 000 Euro

Smart systems, in which sophisticated software/hardware is embedded in physical systems are part of everyday life. From simple products with embedded decision making software to massive systems in which hundreds of systems, each with hundreds or thousands of embedded processors, interoperate, the growth of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is likely to accelerate. For Europe to benefit from this expansion, while avoiding the pitfalls that such complexity creates, there must be advances in the modelling and simulation (M&S) of CPS. Collaborative research with the US will be an opportunity to advance European M&S capabilities for CPS. The overall aim of TAMS4CPS is to lay the foundations for concrete EU-US collaboration in modelling and simulation for cyber-physical systems. To achieve this, Loughborough and Newcastle Universities (M&S) will work with Steinbeis Innovation (road mapping) and leading researchers in the field at top US universities to create: - A strategic research and collaboration agenda, endorsed by researchers in EU and US - A set of test cases for model developers to perform collaborative evaluation - A state of the art web-based report to act as a baseline for collaborative research Taking a consultative approach, we will engage industry and academic researchers and M&S users in workshops and web-based meetings to prioritise M&S research challenges and to create a constituency of future collaboration partners for pre-competitive research in the Artemis themes, of: - Architectures principles and models for safe secure Cyber-Physical Systems - Systems design, modelling and virtual engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems - Autonomous adaptive and cooperative of Cyber-Physical Systems - Computing platforms and energy management for Cyber-Physical Systems To which is added the exploitation and enabling theme of: - Integration of socio/legal/governance models within modelling frameworks Thus, this project directly addresses European priorities in CPS.