Today’s urgent challenges are inherently complex and systemic and will not be solved by individual actors or territories in isolation. To foster enabling innovation ecosystems across the EU, a systemic approach that is inclusive and collaborative is required. Diverse actors from separate regions ensure an equitable diffusion of benefits and maximise the value of innovation for all. This project aligns with EIE’s aims to create more connected, inclusive and efficient innovation ecosystems that support the scaling of companies and spur innovation to address important challenges in a responsible way. Previous projects and collaboration (i.e. WST, S3P) are used as the foundation for this further development. Proposal topics The project will focus on digitalisation within water-heavy sectors as an enabler to create a water smart society. Concept The project will take a threefold approach to driving cross-regional innovation with the water-smart focus area. These are: 1) Prioritisation of key innovation areas Regionally, the project will generate a base of qualitative and quantitative data on existing capacities, gained from partners' experience and knowledge, and through engagement of quadruple-helix stakeholders. This process will drive the identification of innovation priority areas regionally. 2) Cross-regional actions Through cross-regional workshops, key innovation areas and gaps will be identified with a focus on formulating cross-regional action plans that generate a pipeline of specific ideas / concepts for future projects. The workshops will analyse gaps in the competences of each of the regions to foster cross-regional collaboration. 3) Idea generation and partner matching Based on the cross-regional workshops, the partners will select / match key innovation ideas and stakeholders through workshops, webinars, and digital co-creation. The focus will be to develop a pipeline of concepts for future collaboration ( E.g. EUREKA, Water4All, Horizon Europe)

Key Enabling Technologies (KET´s) deployment will be the driving force for a significant part of the goods and services that will be available in the market in the next decade. Amongst KET´s, nano-enabled surfaces and membranes must be highlighted due to their huge potential to offer material solutions to address Sustainable Development Goals resulting in positive and sound impacts for the society and key industrial sectors NewSkin aims to create an Open Innovation Test Bed (OITB) to provide the Innovation Ecosystem with the necessary resources and services to uptake a set of game changing, efficient and cost-effective innovative processes to manufacture nano-enabled industrial and consumer products. During the Grant execution the Consortium partners will create an OITB, as well as its structure and procedures establishing a single-entry point, and will validate the OITB capacity to provide services to the I.E executing 165 showcases. After the Grant execution the OITB aims to generate €66.17 million revenues in 5 years creating a €6.7 billion KET market to be absorbed by an end user market of valued at €1 trillion. In 2029, end users markets will obtain economic benefits of about €52.6 billion savings per year mostly devoted to lower energy consumption, increased resources efficiency as well as a reduction of the carbon and volatiles footprint of 184CO2 MT per year and 0.57 MT of VOC’s per year.