The EXCEED - EXCELLENCE IN GREEN AND DIGITAL MANUFACTURING project aims at establishing a European COVE network of 6 centres in 5 countries, Italy, Spain, Finland, Czech Republic, and Greece to support innovation and sustainable competitiveness of the Advanced Manufacturing (AM) sector. As one of the pillars of the European economy, AM has been strongly impacted by the twin transitions, generating disruptive changes, beside the urgency to foster industry decarbonization. To face those changes and new challenges, citizens, present and future workforce needs new competencies, for life and work. VET providers can play a crucial role preparing the workforce and the society of the future, no one left behind, increasing their responsiveness, operating in strong connection with policy levels. EXCEED assumes the synergic and mutual benefitting application of digital and green, according to the so-called “digital eco-innovation” paradigm and the transition to the circular digital economy as powerful leverages to accelerate innovation in AM. Involving a public-private platform of overall 39 partners, 18 full and 21 associates, EXCEED will work as an alive integrated skills ecosystem, promoting, 1) upskilling and reskilling of low-skilled adults and workers at risk of marginalization through a joint internationalized, flexible and individualized Life Long Learning training offer; 2) strengthening the HIGHER VET (EQF 4 and 5) through design of new curricula and updating of existing ones; 3) adopting joint strategies for Talent Management by the establishment of an International Talent Factory, aware of the fact that talented and skilled individuals have a key role to play in countries’ future prosperity; 4) upskilling and empowerment VET professionals as key profiles translating innovation in education contexts. In 4 years, partners expect to involve at least n. 600 learners and an overall number of 26.000 beneficiaries through an extensive multichannel communication strategy.

Entrepreneurship education has been on the agenda of pedagogical development in all levels of education for years. Student companies has been one common form of entrepreneurship education. Nevertheless, it seems that sustainability is not so often included in student companies or other entrepreneurship initiatives applied at educational institutions. It would be important that those who are considering starting a business also understand the importance and potential of sustainability. Sustainability – from cultural, social, ecological and economical points of view – offers an opportunity to equip students with more positive expectations and images for the future. From ecological and economical point of view, resource saving in business is necessity.The core idea of the project matches the international and European need to reverse and lessen the effects of the climate change. The recent strikes with 1.3 million people on climate change is just one evidence that the younger generation is concerned about the future and the sustainability of the mother earth. Therefore the consortium partners, monitored by external stakeholders, will develop the concept, the content, and pedagogical methods for the Sustainability-driven Entrepreneurship study unit. This will be done by gathering and analysing learning outcomes from local curriculums and developing new ones to match stakeholders’ needs for creating the concept for the study unit. Learning and teaching material will be produced including case examples from local companies highlighting their current sustainability-driven practices in partner countries. Sustainability-driven Entrepreneurship -project aims to •improve and increase entrepreneurial competence among students, teachers and trainers •increase background knowledge on sustainability and sustainability-driven entrepreneurship•produce learning and teaching material and related pedagogical methods to support the students when acquiring these skills and competences•create and pilot a competition at local and European level, where multi-sectoral student teams solve challenges given by companies. The project partnership consists of four vocational schools (VET), two higher education institutions (HEI), one high school, one enterprise and one regional ministry of education in all seven countries (FI, IT, DE, NL, BE, UK and ES). Each partner has its own network for monitoring and dissemination purposes of the project. These networks will be involved in arranging local competitions and other project activities. In average, five staff members and 20-30 students from each partner will be involved. The key target groups of the project are students, teachers, trainers and local small and medium sized companies. Partners will develop the concept, content and pedagogical methods for the Sustainability-driven Entrepreneurship study unit in close cooperation with local working life representatives. Surveys will be used for situation analysis and evaluating the impact of the training the trainers and the pilot.The activities can be grouped in the following thematic areas:•situation analysis survey•development of learning and teaching material including compilation of best innovative practices in companies in seven countries; innovation with sustainable approach; and service design•development of train-the-trainers material and building-up the capacity of trainers•pilots including local competitions and European level final competition in implementing the sustainability-driven entrepreneurship study unit•quality assurance by the local project group including key stakeholders and representatives of enterprises•impact evaluation to verify the impacts of the implemented study unit among the students and teachers•dissemination activities including website, social media campaigns, joint articles and publications, conference presentations and the multiplier event•project management and coordination including transnational meetings.The project will produce International Sustainability-driven entrepreneurship study unit (15 competence points/ECVET points) with a practical plan with learning outcomes as well as a handbook for trainers including the learning material. Local and international competitions will bring the learning close to practice. Students in multi-sectoral and international teams will strengthen the key competences/transversal skills, which should match the requirements of their future employees better. The partner organizations will include the study unit in their current/future curricula to sustain the results after the project. National level education authorities will be sensitized on the results in order to present the sustainability-driven entrepreneurship unit as a vital option for educational institutions at all levels. European citizens and entrepreneurs should do their best to improve their actions towards long-term sustainability.

Europe gave birth to the industrial revolution about two centuries ago thanks to the convergence of a series of factors that allowed technology to be closer to society, while creating economic benefits to regional and national economies. With the globalisation, European cities lost a large volume of manufacturing capacity and transitioned to a knowledge economy. The result: a decrease in manufacturing jobs, the lack appreciation for these jobs, and neglected industrial areas subject to decay. Decay of industrial heritage has a major imprint on European city's identities, but also is a source of opportunity. The result, industrial areas with high historical value for Europe being abandoned or exploited by extractive economic activities, with no connection to local knowledge, and with no generation of value at the local level. CENTRINNO aims to develop and demonstrate strategies, approaches and solutions for regeneration of industrial historic sites and areas as creative production and manufacturing hubs, that 1) hold true to the ecological challenges of our time, 2) boost a diverse, inclusive and innovative urban economy, and 3) and use heritage as a catalizer for innovation and social inclusion. We give centre stage to craftsmen, vocationally trained professionals, entrepreneurs, makers, SME’s, Fab Labs, Food Labs and Makerpaces to become key players in the cities supply of local goods and support them to take on a fundamental role in our future cities, thus opposing disengagement and stagnation of local economies. Through a holistic method combining the Fab City Global Initiative approach to productive cities with Emotion Networking, life cycle assessment and spatially-specific material flow analyses, we bring to the fore both complex, layered histories of these sites as well as the cities available resources in terms of urban landscape, materials, current day skills and practice and human capital.

MORE 4 Europe (new name of RECOGMOB 4) objective is to implement recognized mobility for level 4 EQF, using hospitality and catering experimentation. Recognized mobility must be distinguished from traditional mobility: - by its objective of preparing unit of learning outcomes abroad; linguistic and / or cultural objective is not the first even if it remains. - by using the principles of ECVET, i.e. transfer, recognition and accumulation of learning outcomes. - through the use of ECVET tools for recognized mobility, memorandum of understanding, learning agreement and the personal transcript of record. The project involves joint work between two groups of partners, competent bodies for certification and vocational schools. The former has to set up the regulatory framework to make possible recognition and accumulation of units prepared abroad. The latter is in charge of experimentation with the development of learning agreements between school partners within the memorandum of understanding (MoU); schools will have to support learners during mobility with pedagogical axe and assess learners' learning outcomes, reporting and transferring personal transcript of learners’ record.The project methodology has 3 key points along 2 years: - Preparation of mobility with setting up a memorandum of understanding, drafting learning agreements, selection of learners who will benefit from mobility, preparing the departure of learners. This will be the first year of the project. - Mobility itself by learners with varied modalities and timing tested during the project: academic mobility (at the school), internship (in company) or associating the two; Mobility of 6 to 8 continuous weeks or shorter or discontinuous, mobility. - Improvement of mobility for level 4 EQF based on the lessons learned. The aim is to set up a strong and clear methodology for schools wishing to implement recognized mobility with operational tools, advice and alerts, in order to develop keys to the success of such mobility. There are right now seven partners from France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. They belong to territories with various sizes and skills in terms of training and certification: Académie d’Aix-Marseille for France, Catalonia for Spain, Piemont for Italy and Portugal. Each partner is either a certification authority (Rectorat d'Aix-Marseille, Generalitat de Catalunya, USR Piemont and Turismo de Portugal) or a hotel school (Marseille, Barcelona, Mondovi, Setubal).A peculiarity is to be noted for Portugal: Turismo de Portugal is the only partner, the hotel school of Setubal acting under its tutelage. These partners all have strong experience of partnerships and / or collaborations in transnational projects. The whole project is carried by the GIP (educational interest group) of Marseille which deposits and coordinates it. The experimentation concerns level 4 of the European qualification framework. If level 5, corresponding to older learners most of whom are majors, has already been the subject of European mobility projects, Level 4 still suffers from a lack of experimentation, particularly related to the constraints specific to a range of learners who are mostly minors, in the phase of personal construction, and of a rather limited level of autonomy. Experimentation is taking place in the hotel and catering sector very mobility friendly, this facilitates the involvement of actors.The result of the project, the guidelines for recognised mobility, have been available to the target public by numerical and paper way of communication and was disseminated in several seminars.The expected impacts first affect the project partners who will develop new skills in the field of driving and accompanying the mobility of learners. But beyond the partners, the objective is to convince vocational schools and colleges to move from classical mobility to recognized mobility by showing the benefits for all stakeholders.The long-term benefit is clearly to make European professionalism a reality making learners able to fit into any type of company in their sector in Europe. The development of a European citizenship is also a powerful benefit of mobility paths.

"Cedefop's European Skills Index 2020 shows wide differences between European countries when it comes to skills matching. Indeed, according to Cedefop’s publication “Insights into Skill Shortages and Skill Mismatch” (January 2018), four out of ten employers in Europe are struggling to find people with the right skills. In a labour market heavily impacted by Industry 4.0 and SDG commitment (2 million employments will be created by the latter), and the rise of soft skills as a new area of interest in terms of qualifications, differences between skills offer and demand have widened. The context of the COVID-19 outbreak must also be noted, affecting the need of resilience as a fundamental skill; as the Commission has already stated, upskilling and reskilling programmes to protect workers from unemployment and loss of income to avoid permanent effect will be an essential tool to mitigate the effects of the crisis, with 59 million jobs at stake and those without university degrees in a higher risk (short-term job risk is highly correlated with level of education, McKinsey & Company, April 2020). Therefore, there is a crucial need for education and training systems to identify, anticipate and teach skills that are suitable for future needs, rather than to catch up with technological, demographic and environmental changes after they have happened. Vocational Education and Training (VET) is crucial to teach students, adults and workers the necessary skills and will therefore have a significant impact on the future of work.For all these reasons and with the objective of aligning the education and training provision with regional smart specialisation strategies (S3), the Stride for Stride project will work on building up the concept of Regional Skills Ecosystems. Six regions (Catalonia, Basque Country, Tuscany, Brittany, Varaždin, and Vestland) in five European countries (including high achievers, such as Croatia, mid-achievers, such as Norway, and low-achievers such as Spain, Italy and France when it comes to skills matching according to the European Skills Index 2020) will improve their capacity to identify skills needs and adapt their training provision accordingly. And this process needs to be done by engaging four main axes: public authorities, education centres (VET in this case), companies and the individual.Four workshops corresponding to the four steps of skills governance (adaptation, anticipation, transmission and use) will be organised in Florence, Rennes, Bergen and Barcelona between 2020 and 2022, with a double European-regional perspective that allow all the previously mentioned actors build together skills intelligence systems by means of exchanging their experiences (both though workshops and study visits) and taking part in multi-stakeholder open discussion hubs. These workshops will be attended by international regional representatives who wish to learn on the ground from each others' success stories and share their own, but also by local/regional stakeholders who will contribute to dialogue to build strong skills ecosystems based on the skills governance process.In this sense, the Stride for Stride project will add an international aspect to regional success stories, with a two-folded innovative aim:1.Tackling skills intelligence and forecasting at regional level to build regional skills ecosystems, and2.involving all relevant actors featured in the quadruple helix interaction system to help building powerful skills intelligence tools, not only as external ""validators"" of the process, but as an intrinsic part of it.A regional perspective for skills challenges mapping and forecast is of utmost importance to tackle the new opportunities that industry 4.0, SDGs and soft skills relevance are already opening in Europe. Regions allow a closer contact with citizens and are in a privileged position to assessterritorial economic, labour and well-being needs, including lifelong and lifewide learning opportunities. This project will also serve as a starting point for the development of exhaustive territorially-aware assessment tools that complement existing ones such as Cedefop’s national skills forecasts and OECD skills outlooks."