Water is central to all human activities, to all components of the EU Green Deal and to several UN SDGs. The Water4All Partnership aims at enabling water security for all on the long term through boosting systemic transformations and changes across the entire research – water innovation pipeline, fostering the matchmaking between problem owners and solution providers. It gathers more than 70 partners, R&I funders, environment ministries, local authorities, European, national and regional-scale networks, research performing organisations. It will collaborate with other relevant R&I initiatives. Water4All proposes a portfolio of multi-national, cross-sectoral activities, targeting a variety of actors, intending to generate the following outputs: - Strengthen the water R&I collaboration at European and international levels, across at least 31 countries, notably through Joint Transnational Calls - Coordinate and leverage the activities of the Water R&I community - Support and promote the demonstration and access to market of innovative solutions - Produce, share and better communicate water-related knowledge & data, from local to global scales - Enhance talent development of water R&I professionals - Foster capacity development and life-long training of water policy-makers, stakeholders and civil society - Design & implement approaches for participatory development of innovation Water4All will run its activities across 7 themes of its strategic agenda: water for circular economy; water for ecosystems and biodiversity; sustainable water management; water and health; water infrastructure; international cooperation; water governance. Water4All’s outputs will contribute to: - Deliver sound knowledge, tools and evidence basis on water for policy- & decision-making - Improve consideration of water impacts in all relevant policies - Enhance the field/market use of innovative solutions to water challenges - Increase citizens’ awareness and engagement for an inclusive water

The overall goal of MULTISOURCE is to, together with local, national, and international stakeholders, demonstrate a variety of about Enhanced Natural Treatment Solutions (ENTS) treating a wide range of urban waters and to develop innovative tools, methods, and business models that support citywide planning and long-term operations and maintenance of nature-based solutions for water treatment, storage, and reuse in urban areas worldwide. MULTISOURCE will allow users to identify multiple sources for local water reuse, promote increased uptake of nature-based solutions, and minimize discharge of water that has not received adequate treatment. MULTISOURCE will deliver new knowledge about ENTS and their ability to remove waterborne contaminants and provide effective risk reduction for chemical and biological hazards, as well as their capacity to be integrated into the landscape and contribute to the improvement of urban habitats. The project includes seven pilots treating a wide range of urban waters. Two individual municipalities (Girona, Spain; Oslo, Norway), two metropolitan municipalities (Lyon, France; Milan, Italy), and international partners in Brazil, Vietnam, and the USA will contribute to each of the main project activities: ENTS pilots, risk assessment, business models, technology selection, and the MULTISOURCE Planning Platform. The use of urban archetypes in the Planning Platform will enable users to quickly classify regions (in both developed or developing countries) suitable for the application of nature-based solutions for water treatment (NBSWT) and compare scenarios both with and without NBSWT. This unique approach provides the knowledge, business models, and modular tools that will enable stakeholders to conduct fit-to-purpose, large-scale planning in their local region and, in doing so, promote circularity and sustainable development in the urban water sector and overcome barriers to widespread uptake of nature based solutions for water treatment.

‘No business is too big to fail or too small to be successful’. This Brian Solis’s sentence highlights the evolutionary process that makes obsolete and uncompetitive those businesses that are not able to grasp the change. Adaptive capacity becomes essential in the evolution of the businesses, especially for SMEs.Education and training are key drivers in the process of spreading a stronger culture of entrepreneurship in Europe. It is considered as having the potential to contribute to the building of entrepreneurial mindsets among the young citizens of Europe, to an increase in the rates of business start-up survival, as well as to more growth and innovation in SMEs, and hence to contribute to the growth of employment opportunities in the medium term.Nowadays, assistance to SMEs and start ups takes the form of traditional services such as coaching and financial support in the areas of law, marketing, accounting and intellectual property rights, provided free of charge of for a low fee within structures such as incubators. However, the traditional assistance lacks of skills and expertise in the new techniques and tactics aimed at deeply understanding both the needs of entrepreneurs and customers.This is why the project aimed at combining in an original way the gamification theory and the ‘growth hacking’ strategy.This innovative mix will allow to deliver new skills to business developers and coaches in assisting entrepreneurs, by offering both a more personalized assistance to be focused on the specific needs of each entrepreneur, and by helping them in ‘automating’ the generation of ideas according to the growth hacking strategy.Through the project, new skills will be delivered to 10 professionals for each partner, for a total of 80 gamehackers. Participants will be graduates, business developers, tutors at incubators and business accelerators.The new figure created will be a flexible, multi-tasking expert able to deeply understand the behavior, attitudes, thoughts and emotions of the entrepreneurs, and to assist him/her in the ruthless selection process of the ‘entrepreneurial Darwinism’ through unconventional activities based on game-play techniques such as strategy, goals, rules, scoring, levels etc. Successful gamification does not always depend on the complexity of the game play, but the key is forcing deeper connections with the players.Organization that have successful implemented gamification techniques design experiences that motivate and engage users to advance their personal and business goals. The project aim at creating a pilot transnational training course based on formal, informal and non-formal training (MOOC, live training, workshops etc.) to be replicated in the future through the involvement of business accelerators, business schools, research centres and public organizations in the field of entrepreneurship. The sharing of collected results in the testing phase will allow the creation of a high-standard competence profile through the definition of a quality standard to be fulfilled by all bodies aiming at becoming part of the network.Through the implementation of a virtual platform, the GAG-Platform, OER will be made available and the participants will be involved in 3 national meetings for each country, after the end of the project, in order to disseminate the project results. Furthermore, the construction of a Community of Practice for sharing innovative gamehaking capsules, both in the public and in the private sectors will be an asset assuring project sustainability and process innovation.The consortium comprises 8 international partners from Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Italy and Portugal having the expertise and know-how for building an European Network of business game-hackers. This international partnership will offer the proper framework for discussions, sharing of experiences, innovative practices and methodologies and also for development of results.The main results are the identification of emerging “hard” and Soft” skill set, related to the new challenges addressing the entrepreneurial coaching sector; to validate a cross-country and cross-sectorial methodology for participatory need analysis; to generate a permanent open repository for innovative self-training and self-assessment among gamification experts and entrepreneurial coaches; to test peer-to-peer training and skills evaluation by generating software-based tool; to create a unique competence profile for gamehackers; to create a Virtual Learning Hub in order to establish a network of European qualified gamehackers.The envisaged impact is reflected in the improvement of training schemes aimed at addressing incubation and acceleration managers and innovative training solutions to enforce growth-hacking related competences, promoting awareness on the European dimension of entrepreneurship coaching, enlarging information concerning innovative paths for business coaching training.

AWARD recognises the urgency of action due to water scarcity and climate change impacts as well as the need to engage simultaneously the society, the science and the policy into the development of knowledge and strategic water planning. Therefore, AWARD will provide evidence-based solutions to consider AWRs into water supply strategic plans, based on socio-political engagement. The 4 Demo Cases of AWARD are already implementing AWRs (storm water, rainwater and aquifer recharge in Bucharest in Romania as well as in Milano in Italy; water reuse in Cyprus, storm water and rainwater in an industrial park in Santiago di Compostel in Spain). Through the project activities, Demo Cases will consider scaling up their actions taking in account a broader range of AWRs together with conventional water resources for planning future water supply systems at local or regional level using AWARD instruments (Local Water Fora, Digital Platform for decision making, training and guidance). They will address similar issues in a harmonised and coordinated way. Societal awareness to support the decision process on AWRs supply solutions will lead to the recommendations for further use of AWRs encompassing the 4 dimensions of social innovation (Technological, Capacity development, Governance & Policy, Economics & assessment). The AWARD AWRs catalogue will gather the project results and additional solutions which will be benchmarked. The digital platform provided by AWARD will support the exploration of resilient scenarios that will be promoted beyond the scope of the project thanks to dedicated networking activities. AWARD general objective is to provide evidence-based knowledge and lessons learnt on how to effectively integrate affordable, acceptable and reliable AWRs solutions into water supply strategic planning and implementation considering the effect of global changes.

Based on a detailed mapping of urban challenges and relevant nature-based solutions (NBS), Nature4Cities aims at developing complementary and interactive modules to engage urban stakeholders in a collective-learning process about re-naturing cities, develop and circulate new business, financial and governance models for NBS projects, as well as provide tools for the impacts assessment, valorisation and follow-up of NBS projects. The different modules are: • a database of generic NBS and associated environmental, economic and social performances • an observatory of NBS projects best practices / case studies • a set of innovative business, financial and governance models for the deployment of NBS in a range of different contexts, together with a tool to help urban stakeholders identify eligible models regarding their NBS project contexts • a NBS project impact assessment toolbox providing capabilities for environmental, economic and social impacts evaluation at different stages in the project development cycle from opportunity/feasibility studies to design steps and project follow-up). This toolbox will built on a range of tools, from generic indicator-based assessment for early project stages, down to detailed modelisations of NBS behaviors. These modules that already have a proper purpose on their own, will furthermore be integrated in a NBS dissemination and assessment self-learning platform [N4C Platform] to assist NBS project developers along the entire life cycle of their projects from opportunity studies and project definition down to performance monitoring. Nature4Cities indicators, methodologies, tools and platform will be field tested in real working environments and on real nature-based solution projects and developments in selected cities in Europe, which will be partners of the project and engage their technical urban and environmental planning teams.