The general aim of FUSILLI is to support the participant pan-European cities (and their peri-urban areas) with the aim to address by a strong cooperation for knowledge sharing and mutual learning the challenges of the food system transformation. The main objective is to build an urban food plan to reach an integrated and safe holistic transition towards healthy, sustainable secure, inclusive, equitable and cost-efficient food systems, through feasible and replicable innovative urban policies leading to deploy improving actions in all stages of the food value chain in line with the four FOOD 2030 policy priorities (Nutrition for sustainable and healthy diets; Climate-smart and environmentally sustainable food systems; Circularity and resource efficient food systems; and Innovation and empowerment of communities). Each city will create or improve the development of a living lab, which is an open innovation ecosystem where concrete actions will be deployed to develop and implement urban food systems policies delivering on the four FOOD 2030 priorities. These living labs have an objective to solve with the implementation of different innovative actions through all the stages of the food chain: production and processing, distribution and logistics, consumption, food loss and waste, and governance. Living lab will involve several stakeholders representing all the actors in the food system at local level: it will have at least a public authority, industry partner (SME or association), consumer association and education. A Knowledge Community will compile the current local initiatives to develop a catalogue of best practises to implement and exchange within the network of the participant living labs as well as other global initiatives.

In order to help SMEs to fully realise their potentials and overcome market failures specific to them, public support to innovation in SMEs is available with a wide range of instruments and support services. At this point, innovation support agencies play a substantial role as intermediates for SME innovation by designing and delivering the innovation support programmes. However, despite the recent strong engagements and delivery of diverse innovation support schemes, addressing different innovation challenges, innovation support agencies still lack in a provision of evidence-based results which will demonstrate effectives of these newly developed schemes. Strengthening innovation management capacities in SMEs is defined as one of priorities of the future agenda for creating market-oriented innovation, but on the other hand, market potential of Social Innovation seems to become in the focus in the past year. Yet this kind of innovation is not well known and acceptance seems to be still low. With an aim of addressing these key challenges - creating an evidence-based innovation support scheme and comprising two central aspects (economic and social), DepoSIt Project objectives to develop a significantly improved innovation support scheme - Innovation Audit tool for Social Innovation and test it in a real environment conditions. By the application of Randomised Control Trial (RCT) method, six DepoSIt Project partners from six EU countries, active and experienced in design and delivery of innovation support programmes, will test the scheme by engaging min. 60 SMEs and in this way examine its effectives. Successful experimentation results will lead to the scheme validation and its upscaling. Furthermore, the Project aims to serve as a best practice example in this way to stimulate and deploy additional innovation agencies (min. 18) to become more effective and efficient in design, delivery and especially in experimentation of designed innovation support schemes.

OptEEmAL aims to develop an Optimised Energy Efficient Design Platform for refurbishment at district level, which will deliver an optimised, integrated and systemic design based on an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) approach for building and district retrofitting projects, reducing time delivery and uncertainties, resulting in improved solutions when compared to business-as-usual practices. This main objective will be deployed through the following key objectives: 1. Development of a holistic and effective services platform for District Energy Efficient Retrofitting Design integrating interoperable modules and tools able to provide services for diagnosis, scenarios generation (according to stakeholders priorities), energy/ cost/ environment/ social evaluation, scenarios optimisation and data export. 2. Reinforcement of the presence of all involved stakeholders through an Integrated Project Delivery approach that will allow them being articulated through a collaborative and value-based process to deliver high-quality outcomes. 3. Development of an integrated ontology-based District Data Model that will contain key information in the fields of energy, comfort, environment (LCA), economic, social wellbeing and urban morphology. 4. Development of an Energy Conservation Measures catalogue (ECM) including technical, operational, maintenance and cost information giving valuable and consistent outputs to the design and district operation and maintenance stages. 5. Development of a bio-inspired optimization module based on Evolutionary computing with the aim to automate the decision making process to obtain the optimal design for an energy efficient retrofitting plan at district level. 6. Development of external connections of the OptEEmAL Platform to external entities (i.e. existing tools enabling the calculation of indicators to generate and optimise the retrofitting scenarios) 7. Strong disseminations, training, exploitation and market deployment strategies.