Within a context of growing urban population, advances in urban logistics operations and improved local authority planning, especially in the field of the urban freight transport, can alleviate the associated negative environmental and economic impacts occurring in cities. Several types of stakeholders are involved in such urban logistics management processes. Among them, freight carriers and shippers are interested in minimizing freight logistics costs in order to maximize their profits, while maintaining a competitive level of service to their customers. City administrators and residents are oriented towards a decrease in traffic congestion, social costs and environmental nuisances, even though they are often direct beneficiaries of high quality delivery services. This leads to a multitude of differing and possibly conflicting objectives that are involved in urban freight transport planning and decision making, yielding a high level of complexity. This provides a main motivation for the development of tools for helping decision makers to reach higher grades of efficiency. Despite growing academic interest, the extent to which freight transport is acknowledged and formally considered in local authority transport planning varies considerably from country to country, and on a more local level, between towns and cities. As a result, policy development with respect to urban freight and city logistics is characterised by a rather fragmented approach, with many city authorities finding it difficult to address the complex set of differing views of a large variety of stakeholders. The proposed project will be aimed at identifying local authority planning needs with regards to urban/city logistics activities and the necessary pre-requisites for inclusion of stakeholders in the process. Finally, the project will promote the knowledge transfer of methods and models through the conceptual development of a novel decision support tool (thanks to involved software houses).

A national service in support of recipients of the H2020 SME Instrument and for the improvement of innovation management in SMEs, with the purpose of more companies with growth potential achieving global scaling. Innovation is a vital ingredient of growth and an important element of the future success of the UK. With some 95% of R&D and innovation conducted outside of the UK and many major and lead market shaping companies being of non-UK origin, access to knowledge, markets, skills and partners is increasingly taking place on a global basis. To ensure UK business stays competitive it is important that it is able to effectively access and exploit the growing global investment in research and innovation. Through EEN ENIW activities we will help businesses build collaborations and partnerships and access the finance, knowledge, skills, networks and customers to more rapidly move a concept through to commercialisation and to scale their business.

A national service in support of recipients of the H2020 SME Instrument and for the improvement of innovation management in SMEs, with the purpose of more companies with growth potential achieving global scaling. Innovation is a vital ingredient of growth and an important element of the future success of the UK. With some 95% of R&D and innovation conducted outside of the UK and many major and lead-market shaping companies being of non-UK origin, access to knowledge, markets, skills and partners is increasingly taking place on a global basis. To ensure UK business stays competitive it is important that it is able to effectively access and exploit the growing trend towards global investment in research and innovation. Through our fully integrated EEN ENIW activities we will help businesses build collaborations and partnerships and access the finance, knowledge, skills, networks and customers to more rapidly move a concept through to commercialisation and to scale their business.

A national service in support of recipients of the H2020 sme instrument and for the enhancement of innovation management in SMEs Innovation is a vital ingredient of growth and an important element of the future success of the UK. With some 95% of R&D and innovation conducted outside of the UK and many major and lead market shaping companies being of non-UK origin, access to knowledge, markets, skills and partners is increasingly taking place on a global basis. To ensure UK business stays competitive it is important that it is able to effectively access and exploit the growing global investment in research and innovation. Through EEN ENIW activities we will help businesses build collaborations and partnerships and access the finance, knowledge, skills, networks and customers to more rapidly move a concept through to commercialisation.