FUTURAL aims to deliver a set of digital Smart Solutions (SS) under 5 Smart Solution domains to address pressing social and environmental challenges. An integrated metasearch platform providing a one-stop shop for SS will be the gateway to FUTURAL's solutions, enabling search and access to SS developed by similar initiatives. FUTURAL will prototype, test, pilot and demonstrate community-led social, technological and business innovations based on the proposed SS in six rural pilot areas in the EU, representing different geographical and socio-cultural contexts. An interdisciplinary consortium of partners and a multi-actor approach will pave a coherent path towards the FUTURAL innovations through joint actions and governance systems. FUTURAL will engage rural communities and pursue public-private interactions to develop new social practices that enable market adoption and widespread social change. A clearly outlined networking, EU-wide Rural Innovation Forum (EU-RIF), building on links with key organisations, networks, projects and initiatives within the European rural development ecosystem will also be developed. The project's Open Call will fund projects that will develop their own SS, based on the five FUTURAL SS domains, to be applied in other rural areas and be available on the project's metasearch platform. A vibrant and sustainable ecosystem will be created around FUTURAL to maximise the impact of the project. The broad application of the project innovations will be enabled through the creation of business models tailored to the needs of different rural contexts and social groups. Policy recommendations and governance frameworks will be co-created in multi-actor workshops in the project's EU-RIF to support, among others, the European Green Deal, the European Digital Strategy, the European Pillar of Social Rights and the EU's long-term vision for rural areas.

BEATLES aspires to change the way agri-food systems currently operate and accelerate the systemic and systematic behavioural shift to climate-smart agriculture and smart farming technologies fully aligned with the ambitions of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies, and the new CAP at regional and EU levels. By adopting a food systems approach, the agri-food value chain is viewed as a system of interlinked components where interactions lead to systemic innovations. Through targeted selection of agri-food value chains across the EU and by engaging multiple stakeholders in the co-creation of systemic innovations, in the context of appropriate behavioural and experimental settings, the project will provide an integrative inventory of behavioural insights about the full range of “lock-ins” and levers that hinder or motivate behavioural change, including individual, systemic and policy factors. Five different food systems representing the major crop and livestock farming systems in Europe (cereals, dairy, stone fruits, livestock, vegetables) in various EU regions (Western, Eastern, Southern and Northern Europe), will be studied to account for the diversity in agri-food systems and conditions in the EU. The behavioural insights are used to develop transformative pathways, via business strategies and policy recommendations, to encourage transition to fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food systems. BEATLES will provide a set of business strategies establishing roadmaps for a fair shift towards climate-smart agriculture, based on environmental, social and economic sustainability assessments. Moreover, a series of policy recommendations and tools will be developed to foster behaviourally informed policy design and implementation. The active participation of multiple value chain actors, at various levels of society (public, political, professional), in the co-creation activities all along the project’s lifespan will establish a mutual understanding of the value

ZeroW has set the ambitious target of playing a key role in the transition of current food systems towards halving Food Loss & Waste (FLW) by 2030 and reaching near-zero FLW by 2050. ZeroW provides significant impacts through the demonstration of innovations in nine real-life food chains, by employing a systemic innovation approach, to effectively address the multidimensional issue of FLW. This involves: (i) pre-identifying systemic innovations, that incorporate multiple interlinked dimensions (process, organisational, strategy, marketing, product, technological, governance, etc.), which are tested and demonstrated; (ii) steering the evolution of innovations towards higher levels of systemic readiness and impact, using a Living Lab co-creation and multi-actor collective learning approach; (iii) enhancing the Living Lab actors’ innovation advancement capability with shared resources facilitating new ways and means of cooperating and co-developing innovations; (iv) developing context-specific trajectories for the systemic innovations (from ideation to scaling-up and commercialisation) leading to the provision of currently missing end products and services that align with consumer attitudes, food actor needs and policy trends. Moreover, ZeroW establishes a clear ‘FLW impact trajectory’, from demonstrator results (2025), scaled up to meet the F2F 2030 goals, and steered through a ‘just transition pathway’ towards a near-zero FLW in 2050.

New trends such as teleworking and e-commerce, as well as the need for a further increase of digital tools in all sectors (i.e., health, education, transportation, farming, etc.) demanded by the Covid-19 pandemic, are pointing out once again digital territorial inequalities, supply-chain disruptions and deficiencies in economic opportunities that hamper resilience and prosperity of rural communities. Accessibility and connectivity are key issues to mitigate this erosion of socio-territorial cohesion. However, identifying a common solution for equipping rural communities with increased access to services, opportunities and adequate innovation ecosystems ensuring that no one left behind is a challenging task, mainly due to the diversity of challenges and needs of different locations. In this respect, XGain fosters a sustainable, balanced and inclusive development of rural, coastal and urban areas by facilitating access to relevant stakeholders, such as municipalities, policymakers, farmers, foresters and their associations, to a comprehensive inventory of smart XG, last-mile connectivity and edge computing solutions, and of related assessment methods. The XGain overall project objective is, to deliver a Knowledge Facilitation Tool, facilitating business model development, supporting decision-making in the selection of an ecosystem of technologies, consisting of connectivity options and edge processing solutions, by following a multi-actor and practitioner-oriented approach, and by coherently assessing their socio-economic and techno-environmental effects, aiming at: increasing systemic resilience and energy efficiency; contributing to climate mitigation; and reducing the digital divides between different types of citizens, farms, sectors and regions.

The QuantiFarm project focusses on supporting the further deployment of digital technologies in agriculture (DATs) as key enablers for enhancing the sustainability (economic, environmental, social) performance and competitiveness of the agricultural sector. It will achieve this by establishing a framework for assessing the impact and effectiveness of DATs in agriculture and developing innovative tools, services and recommendations for farmers, advisors and policy makers. Following a multi-actor approach, QuantiFarm will build the project activities around 30 Test Cases (TCs) which span over 20 countries in 10 (of the 11) Biogeographical regions across Europe, capturing multiple geo-political and financial settings. All 30 TCs take place in commercial farms of different types, sizes, ownership and operating conditions from 7 agricultural sectors. Different aspects of these TCs will be examined in the context of different work packages (WPs). The TCs’ actors will be engaged in participatory observation activities to offer valuable input and actively support the behavioural analysis (WP1), the establishment of the Assessment Framework (WP2) and the co-design of an innovative Toolkit for farmers, advisors and policy makers (WP3). The lean multi-actor approach will be used in the testing activities to evaluate the QuantiFarm Toolkit and validate the Assessment Framework by testing the various DATs in real life conditions, across 3 iterations/growing seasons (WP4). The outcomes will be transformed into policy recommendations (WP5) and will feed the QuantiFarm DIA that will help build the capacities of farmers’ advisors in DATs. Finally, a WP on dissemination, ecosystem building and exploitation (WP6), will guarantee the wider dissemination and knowledge transfer in a multi-actor context of the outputs of the project. QuantiFarm includes 32 partners, 12 of them representing farmers and advisors.