SMARTER TOGETHER’s overarching vision is to find the right balance between smart technologies and organizational/ governance dimensions in order to deliver smart and inclusive solutions and to improve citizen’s quality of life. SMARTER TOGETHER gather the European Lighthouse cities Lyon, Munich, Vienna, the Follower cities Santiago de Compostela, Sofia, Venice and Kyiv and Yokohama as observer cities bringing the perspective of East Europe and Asia. The cities are complemented by business partners from energy, mobility and ICT sectors, leading European research and academia organizations, european city network. From the various combinations of the different selected Light House areas, multiples opportunities to learn are offering. SMARTER TOGETHER delivers 5 clusters of co-created, smart and integrated solutions: (1) Living labs for citizen engagement, (2) District heating and RES for low energy districts, (3) Holistic refurbishment for low energy districts addressing public and private housing, (4) Smart Data management platform and smart services (5) E-mobility solutions for sustainable mobility. Expected results are: 1) >151,800 m2 of refurbished buildings, primarily housing estate with a 50-60 % average energy and CO2 reduction; 2) 14.6 MW of newly installed renewable capacity; 3) 10/15new e-mobility solutions for passengers and freight); 4) 1400 created jobs, 130 M€ investments, all deployed with support of integrated ICT solutions and in dialogue with the inhabitants. Large-scale replication will be prepared; 1) in the Lighthouse cities; 2) the Follower cities, which already selected their target area; 3) A Club of 15-20 cities, associate to intensify its roll-out, ensuring a broad geographical and climate coverage. Commercial exploitation is enhanced by the development of new business models for widespread use by the stakeholders. Contributions to open data are expected to create business opportunities as well as inputs to standardization work.

O-CEI overarching goal is to pilot the imperative of accelerating the uptake and upscaling of innovative Cloud-Edge-IoT solutions, strengthening Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy by orchestrating cross-domain data sharing, minimising energy footprint, stimulating multi-sided marketplaces, and promoting open standards for virtualisation and interoperability. For doing so, O-CEI will feed with such innovative technologies, and a comprehensive framework, to eight multidimensional real-world pilots framed in key strategic sectors: electricity grid, electromobility, software-defined vehicles, agrifood and agriculture, logistics and urban environments. It will swiftly create and implement innovative solutions across the cloud continuum; and effectively address the needs of existing and emerging individual and cross-sector business value chains. By designing blueprints and providing utilities beyond the SotA, O-CEI will help project stakeholders (and 32 Open Call awardees) to achieve challenging objectives. All pilots are formed by technical and stakeholder actors covering the necessary value chains, having an outstanding cross-domain unifying thread: energy flexibility.