The project Placement Opportunities With Entrepreneurial Reach (POWER) will facilitate the establishment of a coherent, sustainable and EU-wide placement ecosystem, which is primarily focussed on high impact placements with evident entrepreneurial elements. This will be achieved by the purposeful cooperation of 5 universities and 4 incubators who together will create modern, targeted and user-friendly ICT tools as well as provide comprehensive guidance and support material (via blended trainings, webinars and guidelines) both for the academic and business worlds in order to better equip them to support highly-skilled current and future entrepreneurs.The project POWER intends to develop tools and accompanying resources to build a highly attractive and efficient placement management and facilitation ecosystem, thus ensuring that it is beneficial:- For current MA students and future graduates across the EU to improve their entrepreneurial competences, their business planning and employability skills; - For the start-up community and incubators to ensure access to a pool of local as well as international talents for further growth of their start-up businesses;- For universities to modernise and digitalise placement management tools, therefore increasing the accessibility and visibility of placement opportunities for their students not only locally, but also across the EU.The ICT infrastructure as well as the accompanying material will allow universities, incubators and students to connect at a local and cross-border level, thus considerably increasing the opportunities of powerful entrepreneurial placement experience for students and ensuring the right match of relevant skills and competences of students for further growth of the start-up community.The 10 consortium members have set ambitious goals that will be achieved in close cooperation with over 50 associate partners, including universities, EU-wide networks and incubators.

The HARMONY project aims to advance excellence in standardization by developing harmonized protocols for comprehensive disaster risk management, encompassing Prevention/Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery. Its core vision is to create a unified framework that transcends the current siloed approaches, enabling an integrated and coordinated assessment of impacts, risks, and interactions of climate-related and geological hazards across sectors and borders. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies and fostering collaboration among scientists, emergency responders, and policymakers among others, HARMONY seeks to enhance early warning systems, optimize response mechanisms, and support recovery strategies. This will contribute to building a climate-resilient society, capable of addressing the increasing intensity and frequency of disasters while minimizing their socio-economic impacts. By focusing on transnational collaboration, the project integrates novel technologies such as Earth observation, AI-driven predictive models, and GIS-based decision support systems. Large-scale pilot tests will be conducted in Spain-Portugal, Kosovo-North Macedonia, and Bulgaria-Greece, targeting climate-related and geological disasters including wildfires and floods. In addition, the project will build on a cohesive capacity building programme and replication guidelines to support scaling up of the proposed systemic approach across different areas in Europe.

The highly dynamic technological developments, the evolution of the socio-economic environment, the changes of the political conditions and other vastly influential factors greatly affect market trends, trigger growth, foster job opportunities and create new skill demands in a very fast pace. These powerful forces are identified as “megatrends”. Even though centres of excellence, such as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), research centres, market innovators and emerging industries, may benefit, through megatrends developments it is also evident that educational centres, especially Higher Education Institutes (HEIs), seem unable to cope with this fast transformation due to the rapid pace of changing and in some cases due to inflexible learning modes. This mismatch becomes even more intensive in ICTs, an area where megatrends raise urgent challenges and needs of high-qualified personnel. As a result, an inefficient loop is observed: centres of excellence struggle to find talented and skilled young specialists while graduated students are in lack of practical skills required in labour market and industry. The main aim of the “pArtneRship foR AddressiNG mEgatrends in ICT” (ARRANGE-ICT) is to join together HEIs, entrepreneurships and industry in order to address the competences and occupational profile needs in the labour market, provide innovative solutions to skills mismatch and promote sustainable business opportunities. In this context, this project has the following key objectives: a) to bridge the current digital skills gap in southern Europe following the European Commission's 'e-Skills for jobs' campaign. ARRANGE-ICT will join representatives from governments, industry, academia and other key stakeholders across southern Europe through a Smart Job Hub b) to build an ecosystem of key partners for creating an access port in underrepresented talent pools c) to identify the underrepresented skills, the rationale behind the phenomenon of talented people who lack the traditional credentials to land a good job and the ICT domains with the most pressing needs d) to promote business opportunities, through a Smart Job Hub, between Universities and industry, including new ICT-based internship programs, common PhD student supervision between HEIs and industry and common Bachelor and Master theses supervision in SMEs, market and industry premises e) to envisage a range of new initiatives to ensure that these skills are adequately promoted in the curriculum, in teacher development, in assessment practices and in learning content The ARRANGE-ICT consortium brings together six partners from three southern European countries: 4 HEIs (TUS-BG, UoWM-GR, UCY-CY, ULSIT-BG), 1 research institution (SEERC-GR), and 2 industrial clusters (AIZ-GR, SCY-CY). In order to fulfill the aforementioned objectives, the ARRANGE-ICT project includes three teaching/training activities focused on: 1. HEI trainers 2. Industrial managers 3. Senior undergraduate and postgraduate students (bootcamp) Furthermore, the project involves the organisation of three multiplier events, for the dissemination of the six project intellectual outputs (“Research and Field Review”, “Smart Job Hub”, “Foresight Study”, “Guide for Instructors”, “Modernised Curricula & Short Programmes”, “Evaluation Metrics and Sustainability Report”). The methodology followed to perform the activities, organise the events, develop the outputs, and reach the set goal comprises five phases, as listed below: 1. Background research and field investigation 2. Analyse, Design, and Develop the Smart Job Hub 3. Co-Create content and material for revealing skill gaps and megatrends 4. Capacity building driven by megatrends 5. Dissemination and Impact Assessment The project results have a notable impact on several stakeholders, which is summarised as follows: - On HEIs: Mitigation of the ICT “skill-crisis” by supporting the design of evidence-based reforms of curricula. - On students and graduates: Preparation of high ICT-skilled, empowered, motivated and self-confident future professionals. - On industrial and market stakeholders: Sharing of knowledge and cooperation with the participating HEIs, since academic degrees (Bachelor’s and Master’s) will be promoted in the eyes of industry and market recruiters, while applied research will be conducted in their premises. - On society: Linking HEIs and business world is a pre-requisite, especially in South Europe, where the consequences of the on-going economic crises and the resulting unemployment, are more evident. ARRANGE-ICT aspires to offer better job opportunities for graduates and minimise the risk of unemployment, lower wages and poorer long-term prospects. In order to ensure sustainability, all project outcomes are publicly available, while the participating organisations are signing agreements on post-project output sustainability.