INVITE envisages a well-connected European Open Innovation (OI) ecosystem, in which knowledge meaningfully flows across borders and is translated into marketable innovations, bringing increased socio-economic benefits to EU citizens. To this end, INVITE applies a multi-stakeholder approach to co-design, pilot and demonstrate in diverse real-life settings demand-driven mechanisms, skill-sets and measures in order to facilitate OI. An innovation voucher scheme will stimulate interactions between the demand and the supply of knowledge via an unconventional yet highly flexible way, namely virtual human capital mobility. At the same time, a highly interactive and flexible e-learning intervention will empower EU businesses with the skill-sets to tap into EU’s knowledge-base and turn it into value, while a public-private co-investment scheme will leverage small amounts of public funds to increase participation of private investors in open and collaborative models of innovation. All pilots will integrate OI support services that will appropriately scale to the needs and capabilities of each case and will be facilitated through open ICT tools. Along the process a participatory co-evaluation framework will keep track of the pilots’ performance and fuel iterative, user-driven refinements to generate results ready for scale up and replication. Dedicated business planning exercises in line with a tailored IPR strategy will pave the way for the launch of a pan-European service platform we dub as Open Innovation Lab, to the market, synergising with existing OI platforms and service offers to co-create value for the European OI ecosystem. To this end, INVITE brings together a complementary and multi-disciplinary consortium, comprised of key players within the OI market including leading platform and service providers, international and regional support networks, ICT solution providers as well as private investor networks and pioneering in OI regional development agencies.

The CYANOTYPES project brings together a wide variety of organisations, stakeholders, and European networks to address the needs and skills gaps in the Cultural & Creative Industries. Based on innovative multidisciplinary approaches, CYANOTYPES tackles the sector’s potential for innovation and competitiveness, which deals as well with challenges presented by, among others, COVID-19, the digital transition, and the green shift. The project title references the iron-based photographic process that lead to the term “blueprint” we know today.[1] Inspired by this key moment of innovation, CYANOTYPES sees in this very practice an exemplary episode from the pre-digital archive of arts-and-technology experimentation that inspires creators to this day. Invoking a pre-digital technology, CYANOTYPE cautions that “the digital” is itself in a moment of transition, offering us new possibilities and perspectives. While we anticipate growing roles for AI, Big Data, and synthetic content generated by data-driven systems in the immediate future, we also see the need to imagine multiple futures on which innovation in CCI education depends. Earlier projects indicated that advancing vocational education programs should follow the guiding principle that the “Community is the Curriculum”, moving on from the idea of a wholly centralised, institutional approach to learning. CYANOTYPES builds anticipation into its methodological framework to empower creators to imagine multiple futures and to make their processes more environmental-friendly, sustainable, resilient, and dynamic. Organised by a triple loop learning framework focused on how we “learn how to learn”, CYANOTYPES’ integrates specific and transversal skill sets organized by key thematic areas to serve as context-specific points for different stakeholder groups. CYANOTYPES provides short- and longer-term strategic interventions and concrete skills development solutions that can be adopted across the European CCI ecosystem.