Restoring and maintaining the resilience of the Black Sea ecosystem, while enabling a sustainable exploitation of its natural resources is vital. A better coordination and alignment of research and innovation efforts alongside developing improved knowledge base and joint infrastructures could substantially support this timely challenge. Towards this end the Burgas Vision Paper was produced, by an initiative supported by EC, as the key framework document for a shared vision for a productive, healthy, resilient, sustainable and better-valued Black Sea by 2030. It addresses the four key pillars on which a new Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and its Implementation Plan can be built on: (1) Addressing fundamental Black Sea research challenges, (2) Developing products, solutions and clusters underpinning Black Sea Blue Growth, (3) Building of critical support systems and innovative Infrastructures, (4) Education and capacity building. Building on this recently emerging policy framework, the core contribution of the Black Sea CONNECT CSA will be to scientifically, technically and logistically support the Black Sea Blue Growth Initiative towards the implementation of the Burgas Vision Paper, with a view on boosting the blue economy in the region. The overall objective is to coordinate the development of the SRIA and its implementation plan both at national and regional level. The SRIA and its implementation plan will guide stakeholders from academia, funding agencies, industry, policy and society to address together the fundamental Black Sea challenges, to promote blue growth and economic prosperity of the Black Sea region, to build critical support systems and innovative research infrastructure and to improve education and capacity building. The project will support the design of synergistic activities such as developing an operational network of funders, new transnational joint activities and achieving the knowledge transfer.

Georgia ratified the UN Convention on the right of persons with disabilities in 2014; However PwDs still experience unequal approach and their rights are frequently violated. Low professional competence of school teachers towards working with pupils with disabilities and special educational needs (SEN ) is one of the main factors influencing quality of inclusive education in Georgian schools. Till now no university in the country has an academic program in special education - at the same time there are about 1500 special teachers working in schools- without proper knowledge and academic diploma/certificate. The training program in inclusive education carried out by the National Centre for Teacher Professional Development is an only way for teachers to enhance professional competence in this regard. With existed curriculum GEO HEIs cannot deal with two main challenges the country has towards inclusive education - (1) Special teachers' proper education - providing them with academic knowledge and diploma/certificate and (2) subject teachers’ low competence towards working with pupils wit SEN - ensuing them with proper education at the university and provide with related continuing education programs. The project is focused on development new academic modules in special education that will be integrated in teacher education program at four GEO HEIS - graduates from the program, future subject/general school teachers will have a proper knowledge to work with pupils with SEN. In addition the certificate program in special education creates opportunities to prepare special teachers with academic knowledge and diploma; short term training programs gives opportunities to school/ field practitioners to refresh professional capacity in inclusive education. And finally strong network of professionals (academicians, school practitioners, NGO/DPO and state agencies) arranged with the frame of the project will create good background for better police and practice.

The project is designed to define clearly the mechanisms of transfer and commercialization of knowledge and technologies, which are to be understandable unambiguously and executable within the reasonable timeframes. Realization of the project will enable to eliminate the existing difficulties and bottlenecks in cooperation with enterprises, to make structure of the cooperation more clear and robust and to give new opportunities and open new work horizons.The project is aimed to bring cooperation quality to a new level, to improve it and to enlarge. It means that new communicative, scientific and business links will be established between the enterprises and HEIs.The cooperation to be improved for the following groups: students, teaching and administrative staff of the university and the enterprise. The changes are to be executed at the level of the consortium and to be applied to all the participants. The cooperation for the abovementioned groups will be realized in the forms of internships, workshops, meetings, conferences and round tables. There are no spin-off network between Russia, Portugal, the UK, Spain, China and Georgia. The first steps to build such effectively operating network will be taken in the project by the specialists from the participating parties.The wider objective is promoting Bologna process implementation through enhancing university-enterprise cooperation via spin-off companies best practices. Specific objectives are the following: 1. Development of effective SOC-Model for university-enterprise partnership and piloting in RF and Georgia HEIs.2. Creating of virtual international spin-off network.Project outcomes: 1. SOC-Model for university-enterprise partnership.2. Guidelines for SPC-Model for university-enterprise partnership implementation in partner HEIs (EU countries, Russia, China and Georgia). 3. Training courses for spin-off developers. 4. Virtual international spin-off network.

Renewable energy is becoming a mainstream source of energy, and power electronics is a key enabler of its successful integration. PROXY addresses the issue of « Secure, Clean and Efficient Energy » via the adoption of a new and environmentally friendly power electronics technology for higher efficiency-low carbon energy conversion based on the emerging, cost effective and earth abundant element based wide bandgap semiconductor, Ga2O3. PROXY proposes to develop significantly further than the state-of-the-art power electronic devices based on Ga2O3 in the context of H2020 for the first time; so that Europe can become an actor in this new/hot topic pioneered up till now by groups in Japan and the US. PROXY proposes lower cost, a higher degree of integration with current renewable technologies and the opening of new market opportunities compared to current power electronics technologies. PROXY will establish the first commercial 3 inch ß-Ga2O3 epi-wafer supply for 3.3kV/50A rectifiers and normally-off vertical field-effect transistors by addressing p-type doping issue in order to realize bipolar devices for application. PROXY also proposes to develop unipolar devices based on a novel lift off of heteroepiaxial Ga2O3 layers from insulating growth substrates and transfer to thermally conductive supports which will enable higher power/efficiency operation and longer lifetime. Our novel recycling method developed in the project, will contribute to the knowledge of recovery technology of gallium from of End –of- Life products. Our complete cycle technology (from green design to recovery) will contribute into the challenge of renewable energy, and circular economy conception. The consortium will be interdisciplinary and intersectoral, and will associate a not for profit company specialized in developing synergies and partnership to deliver low carbon solutions, with experience working on environmental technology exhibitions. In order to measure the possible impact of this new technology on our everyday life we will collaborate within the project (as subcontractor) with Yole Development. Yole will give us an overview of power electronic markets worldwide and social benefits related to a new generation of energy devices. The project will allow the proposed technology to achieve TRL4. The time for PROXY is now as it represents a viable route for bringing power devices based on a new emerging WBG material into the market with impacts in the de-carbonization strategic actions following the COP21 directives. The PROXY consortium submitted last year a proposal to a very similar call which obtained a good evaluation on the scientific part. We believe the MRSEI support would allow us to enlarge the consortium and improve our proposal significantly in order to get a better evaluation, especially on the Impact part.