The Start-at-best proposal will be focused in making STARTups and SMEs (small businesses) the BEST place to work, by promoting and fundings small-scale / big-outreach worlplace innovation projects. The proposal is coordinated by the Startup Europe Regions Network, a Brussels based associated born under the auspices of the European Startup Europe Initiative and the Committee of Regions, and that groups several national and regional innovation agencies across Europe, and is directly supported by 3 of these agencies. The project will devote more than 78% of its resources to fund startups, through calls for proposals that will allocate grants of 7,5K€ to a minimum of 30 small businesses in Europe. Our proposal will contribute to making Workplace Innovation easy for SMEs and especially for startups and micro-firms across Europe, by providing financial means to small firms to allow them to experiment new solutions and by developing a strong content basis provided through an easy accessible and clear web site based on an repository of real life, startup-inspired cases that are described in terms of a set of key features and which help to provide answers to companies that are in need for a workplace change. The need and desire to change will be brought to the surface through ways such as workshops, awareness sessions, consulting, etc. Workplace innovation represents a rising tide, but the boats that reach the swell first will be first to succeed. The partners in this proposal are ideally placed to achieve these goals as they include: a leading European association of regional agencies devotes to startup and SME innovation created under the auspices of the Startup Europe EC initiative, the Startup Europe Regions Network (SERN); and 3 regional/national agencies (ASTER, IT, Cork Innovates, IE and ANI, PT) responsible for the management of SME support funds in their regions, and that will enlarge their support to cover workplace innovation projects through this proposal.

The overall objective of CO-VALUE is to boost uptake and deployment of research results by adopting a co-valorisation approach that strengthens the role of societal actors in knowledge valorisation. Citizen engagement will be embedded in knowledge valorisation by deploying capacity building, peer learning actions and experimentation. CO-VALUE will capitalise on and contribute to EU initiatives such as the Knowledge Valorisation Platform, through the production, testing and improvement of best practices and lessons learned in two European territories: Alicante in Spain and Emilia Romagna in Italy. In each territory, quadruple-helix stakeholders from the research & innovation ecosystem will be involved in the co-design and implementation of co-valorisation, exploiting ongoing knowledge valorisation processes such as developing innovative solutions to address the lack of raw materials and its impact on citizens’ welfare (Alicante), or specific funding schemes and projects to introduce multi-stakeholder engagement in public-funded research (Emilia Romagna).The transfer of best practices and skills will be guaranteed by a comprehensive scheme of capacity building, peer learning and shadowing opportunities, both at local and international level. The involvement of umbrella organisations such as EBN, ERRIN and universities alliances will foster a wider uptake of CO-VALUE’s trainings and tools, thus supporting the implementation of new practices by knowledge valorisation agents beyond the project consortium. Incentives for researchers to engage with society, and for society to engage with researchers will be co-designed with stakeholders in each territory and implemented throughthe involvement of local R&I public administrations. Tangible changes in local co-valorisation agents will be exploited to showcase improvements, together with a co-assessment of enabling conditions, processes and impact performed together by all stakeholders involved.

ImpAct Agencies intends to reshape and make more efficient, through the Twinning Advanced methodology, a set of services to support BICs and incubators. Through an open social innovation model, the project will allow BICs and incubators to support social impact SMEs and entrepreneurs to achieve a better impact and play an active role within the local social innovation ecosystem. By matching and integrating social entrepreneurship support programmes, policy strategies and online tools, ImpAct Agencies aims to design a modular kit of tools and services for accompanying entrepreneurs in improving their social impact. The consortium is composed by four Innovation Agencies: ART-ER (Italy) - the project coordinator, Fundecyt-Pctex (Spain), WestBIC (Ireland) and IFKA (Hungary). All of them already work on the topic of social innovation and social entrepreneurship in different ways: shaping policy instruments, developing specific networks and projects or supporting and implementing policy strategies at local level. This twinning advanced action has a multiple goal, since it will support partners in: - carry on a peer review and assessment on their respective service through an active stakeholder engagement activity; - reshape and combine those services linked to open social innovation model; - design a new service package for BICs and incubators dealing with social innovation ecosystems; - set up permanent relations within the partnership with the aim of improving each partners’ services and - build an interregional community of social innovation agencies. The final output of the project is the drafting of a complete Design Option Paper, dedicated to analyse and describe all different scenarios in terms of background, framework conditions and organizations, process and service delivery system and stage of development. This will allow to transfer and mainstream the service delivery system to different EU contexts and agencies.

Social entrepreneurship has been identified as a key feature of the EU social market economy, social enterprises (SEs) contributes to the emergence and expansion of new market-based business models seeking ways to contribute to economic and societal values. SEs also have great potential for developing social innovations to improve quality of life, satisfy new needs, or public sector restructuring. Nonetheless, the concepts of “social economy” and “social innovation” are little known or misunderstood and it seems to be considered rarely as an important factor for business, especially for young people. On the other hand social start-ups encounter more difficulties in reaching the economic sustainability.The project INN@SE rely on the idea that a successful approach to overcome such challenges, can be represented by the open innovation methodology based on a cross-sectoral collaborative process. Thus, the project partnership is created by organizations from countries with different level of know-how on SE (Poland, Italy, North Macedonia, Jordan), representing sectors with different approaches to the topic (higher education, research, NGO). All partners are highly specialized in activities related to young people empowerment, training, social economy research, and start-ups development and the diverse knowledge, experience and skills that each partner imputes to the project, should be valued and recognized as essential to ensure the success and sustainability of the joint efforts.Taking context and needs into consideration, partners have identified the following objectives which derive directly from the 3 target needs areas (skills & capacity building, orienteering & networking, awareness raising):1. To disseminate entrepreneurial mindset and skills among young people at a broader EU level; to provide aspiring young social entrepreneurs with a clear toolkit to start up; 2. To facilitate access of young people and youth staff to information regarding grant, training and mentoring opportunities and tools at local and international level; to promote networking among young SEs; 3. To promote an EU culture of SE among society, rehabilitating entrepreneurship through social entrepreneurship, with a special attention to the contribution represented “by” and “to” young people; to raise awareness among young people as active citizens regarding social, environmental, and diversity challenges of EU communities, and how SE can face them; to promote the visibility among key stakeholders of social businesses and the importance of social innovation and social impact.Target groups to be addressed:- young people (18-35), especially running/involved in SEs or with an interest in doing so – 280 participants directly involved in project activities;- youth workers, trainers, teachers, business coaches and other professionals (and related organizations) supporting and promoting entrepreneurship among young people, relevant stakeholders – at least 70 participants directly involved in project activities.Through a 3 project phases (preparation – implementation – exploitation), the partners will elaborate a joint innovative methodology based on the transfer of the open innovation and co-design approach. 4 intellectual outputs linked to 3 main need areas will be created:1. Inn@SE Youth SE Research Study - a multi-sided analysis in the field of youth SE to define the model of supporting SE of young people, spot weaknesses and strong points and design a training scheme both in the field of training for social entrepreneurs already working and for others who will like to develop their professional careers in this sector.2. INN@SE Youth SE Educational Game – to provide young people with innovative and attractive way to learn about social entrepreneurship.3. INN@SE Young People Training Program & Toolkit - to provide aspiring young social entrepreneurs with a clear and flexible toolkit to start up, with a particular attention to the financial sustainability topic.4. Inn@SE Services for Youth SE - innovative youth SE services and policy recommendation developed through service co-design and design thinking methodologies to better empower and support young social entrepreneurs.Moreover, 3 multiplier events (“Innovathons” which follow the hackathon methodology) will be organized to disseminate project results, promote their exploitation and involve young people at local level.The ultimate purposes or the expected impacts of the project are to contribute to strengthening the offer to enhance professional skills of young people and to promote effectiveness and innovation in the SE development.Holistic approach and multi-sided analysis will ensure the transnational applicability and relatively easy transferability. All materials and training tools will be available on an open source platform, in order to reach the maximum results in terms of visibility, dissemination and access to any indirect beneficiary interested in youth SE.

AD-ASTRA (Aerospace Districts: Acceleration of the Strategic Transfer of Regional Advancements) is a project about the positive interconnection among innovation ecosystems, with a focus on aerospace sectors. The proposal aims at the development of a connected, competitive, interregional innovation ecosystem between 5 EU regions (Toulouse, South Holland, Madrid, Apulia, Emilia-Romagna) with: a shared interest in fostering aerospace sectors, enhancing the cross-contamination to and from other innovative sectors (e.g., automotive, biomedical, agri-food, big data); different innovation readiness levels; aerospace districts with different levels of maturity and consolidation. “Diversity generates wealth”: the collaboration of these markedly diverse regions, furthermore represented by partners from different spheres of the quadruple-helix, will be a growth opportunity. The establishment of a solid and long-lasting collaborative EU network, able to exploit complementary skills, experiences, territorial and industrial vocations, will contribute to create a “critical mass” in EU strategic sectors such as innovation and aerospace, where global competition leads to a confrontation with actors of increasing size and requires innovative models and approaches. This ambitious goal will be achieved through an iterative process: starting from the collection, analysis and systematization of the experiences (competencies, technologies, networks) of the partner regions with reference to their aerospace districts; analyzing the future evolutions of the ecosystems, in response to technological, economic, political, and social megatrends; correcting or validating hypotheses and evolution models with the support of stakeholder groups; defining an action plan for the development of each of the regional aerospace ecosystems, valuing experiences and good practices stemming from other regions and strengthening spin-in and spin-out processes to and from other industrial sector and territories.