Unstable economic, social and environment situation and impacts on the EU enterprises and citizens, and legislative EU framed for dealing with this Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) problems present starting point of this project. The project builds a strategic and collaborative program among partners in order to improve awareness and knowledge, with a goal to build common and understanding approach on the topic of CSR under the EU CSR legislative framework and national frameworks of the partners. More precisely, main objectives of the project are the exchange of good practices in order to educate and increase the project partners', enterprises', decision makers' and participants' knowledge of EU CSR Directives harmonization process to the national legal frameworks, the establishment of permanent network between enterprises, society and decision makers, and the creation of a structured CSR guide and On-line video material in order to increase adult education of CSR legislative to achieve competitive advantage at open labor, goods and services market. Since there is a lack of CSR education and adults with CSR knowledge necessary to implement in modern enterprises, in order to be a part of the solution, consortium is proud strategic partnership established of eight partners that enjoy the reputation in developing and participating CSR education and sharing CSR practice at the EU level. All partners are professionals in CSR with significant impact to enterprises and decision makers in their countries, which will result with a strong influence on the society at large. Alongside partners, project will include eight different enterprises and eight decision makers with experience in implementation and harmonization of CSR EU directives. Project Hi4CSR will include several types of activities. Three transnational project meetings (TPM) will be held in order to monitor the project, in the beginning: to introduce the details of the project to the partners, in the middle: to follow the projects progress, in the end: to summarize the projects results. Learning activities (LA), four short-term joint staff training events, will be 5-day education activities for exchanging CSR practices of harmonization between the partners who are specialized in certain CSR field, in order to achieve a better understanding of the CSR implementation and harmonization to national legal framework and accomplishment of results. LAs will be structured in two parts: presentation of examples of practical activities by decision makers and enterprises, and discussion and interactive workshop between partners, decision makers and enterprises. In order to disseminate the project, project partners will organize and participate in various events where they will present projects outputs and results. Strong on-line campaign with official web site, social media pages, video material and PR promotion will also be emphasized. The project will contribute to the realization of strategy Europe 2020 by equal involvement of European Universities, consulting companies, CSR organizations and decision makers from different countries for the purpose of creating sustainable, stable and inclusive economic growth. It is important that this project is carried out transnationally because it refers to the EU legislative framework from the field of CSR and harmonization to the national frameworks of all EU member states. Participants and their organizations will through collaborative partnership increase the knowledge of CSR EU practices which will be used in their future educational and consulting programs. Materials and seminars will be updated and of higher relevance. From knowledge accumulated and produced during the project, and implemented in the partners’ educational programs and materials, adults will gain precious knowledge, which will improve their competitiveness in the labor market and job situation. A long term expected result of the project is that all participants and stakeholders have a long term positive impact on the economy, wider public groups, local community and environment, as it is the goal of EU legislative framework. By making future education a chargeable and in the short term, a profitable activity, this project will sustain after Erasmus+ programme which helped at this first stage when it was the most needed.

This network brings together an exceptionally strong team of world-leading experts from a wide set of beneficiaries and partners in order to achieve breakthroughs in understanding how the transition towards a Circular Economy (CE) can be realised in a successful way in the European context, both within existing organisations and industries as well as through innovative and sustainable business models. The proposed approach is inherently multi-disciplinary, drawing upon research that will advance significantly the state-of-the-art in terms of the current understanding of the applicability of the CE paradigm from Economic, Environmental and Social points of view, providing policy insights and implications for practice. The consortium of 10 beneficiaries (including 7 academic and 3 non-academic groups) will design and deliver world class multidisciplinary training to 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), offering them an extended and valuable program of international exchanges and secondments through the wide network of partner organisations involved in the proposal. The network builds on the success of previous projects in which beneficiaries have successfully delivered high impact research and knowledge exchange. ReTraCE is specifically designed to train a cohort of new thought leaders capable of driving the transition towards a more sustainable mode of production and consumption in Europe in the next decades, who will directly facilitate the implementation of the recently adopted ambitious Circular Economy strategy of the European Commission, which is closely linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Indeed, it is envisaged that ESRs will be employable not only by research institutions, but also by public sector bodies and within a wide range of manufacturing and service industries which will require new professional profiles for realising the transition towards the CE.

The Open and Universal Science (OPUS) project will develop coordination and support measures to reform the assessment of research and researchers at Research Performing Organisations (RPOs) and Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) towards a system that incentivises and rewards researchers to practise Open Science. We understand the term ‘Open Science’ to refer to practices providing open access to research outputs, early and open sharing of research, participation in open peer-review, measures to ensure reproducibility of results, involving all stakeholders in cocreation. We henceforth in this proposal employ this interpretation of Open Science with a specific focus on reforming the research(er) assessment system to incentivise and reward researchers to take up these practices. OPUS employs a three-tiered approach to ensure representation and consensus building of key stakeholder groups in the Open Science ecosystem: (1) our large project consortium consists of researcher organisations, RPOs, RFOs, industry organisations, and experts in project management, public relations, and Open Science (2) a series of stakeholder engagement sessions will be held with the broader community to gather input and validate key project deliverables (3) an Advisory Board of key representatives will ensure expert oversight and links to the community. • Objective 1: Conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art on existing literature and initiatives for Open Science • Objective 2: Develop a comprehensive set of interventions to implement Open Science at RPOs and RFOs • Objective 3: Develop realistic indicators and metrics to monitor and drive Open Science at RPOs and RFOs • Objective 4: Test the interventions and indicators and metrics via action plans in pilots at RPOs and RFOs • Objective 5: Utilise a stakeholder-driven feed-back loop to develop, monitor, refine, and validate actions • Objective 6: Synthesise outcomes into policy briefs and a revised OS-CAM2 for research(er) assessment