Almost everyday we witness the rise of new cloud technologies, services and solutions. Despite the existing gap, with the US giants the European Cloud Community (ECC) is growing and leading the creation of Single Digital Market in Europe. Still, to strength such market, its fragmentation needs to be reduced. Beyond that, European market is largely dominated by SME that are struggling to adopt cloud services (beyond email and cloud storage) to innovate their business due to the lack of “cloud-culture” and trust toward cloud services. European Commission is leading a number of key actions (e.g. GDPR) to overcome these and other barriers, but it requires the help and the support of the ECC, in terms of a common technology vision, policies and recommendations. While strengthening the Digital Market is beyond the capabilities of European research funding programmes, a clear mandate is to lead the definition of the Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda for Cloud Computing that should provide recommendations and strategies to guide the future of European Cloud services and their market regulations. H-Cloud addresses this challenge by creating a sustainable forum of stakeholders representing the Cloud Computing research, industry and users with the aim to define a common vision for the future of Cloud Computing in Europe. Based on the outcomes of previous actions, H-Cloud will establish the ECC forum as a live community of organisations and individuals that will collaborate around different themes with the aim of addressing challenges and opportunities at research, technological, policy, standardisation and organisational level. The creation of a common vision on Cloud Computing, will be the key to unlock the potential of Cloud Computing to support the creation of a Digital Single Market. Through an open governance model and valuable incentives, H-Cloud will ensure that ECC Forum will outlast the project duration, becoming a valuable asset of the whole ECC.

Many children lose their natural curiosity for how things function and interrelate to each other along the way into their lives as young adults. The Educational Robotics for STEM (ER4STEM) project aims to turn curious young children into young adults passionate about science and technology with a hands-on use case: robotics. The domain of robotics represents a multidisciplinary and highly innovative field encompassing physics, maths, informatics and even industrial design as well as social sciences. Moreover, due to various application domains, teamwork, creativity and entrepreneurial skills are required for the design, programming and innovative exploitation of robots and robotic services. Children are fascinated by such autonomous machines. This fascination and the variety of fields and topics covered make robotics a powerful idea to engage with. Young girls as well as boys can easily connect robots to their personal interests and share their ideas through these tangible artefacts. ER4STEM will refine, unify and enhance current European approaches to STEM education through robotics in one open operational and conceptual framework. The concept is founded on three important pillars of constructionism: 1. engaging with powerful ideas, 2. building on personal interests, and 3. learning through making (or presenting ideas with tangible artefacts). The ER4STEM framework will coherently offer students aged 7 to 18 as well as their educators different perspectives and approaches to find their interests and strengths in robotics to pursue STEM careers through robotics and semi-autonomous smart devices. At the same time students will learn about technology (e.g. circuits), about a domain (e.g. math) and acquire skills (e.g. collaborating, coding). Innovative approaches will be developed to achieve an integrated and consistent concept that picks children up at different ages, beginning in primary school and accompany them until graduation from secondary school.

Reaching the ambitions of the Europe 2020 and the Innovation Union requires much more than just technological innovations. In the academic community, Business Model Innovation (BMI) has for a long time been recognized as the key to improved competitiveness and innovativeness. However, BMI does not reach SMEs yet nor is there knowledge on how SMEs conduct BMI in practice. Empowering SMEs to conduct BMI requires new approaches. By leveraging existing networks and communities, we will gather examples, best practices and insights into Business Models (BM) from case studies from each and every European region or industry, complemented with insights from other leading countries worldwide. The BM vortex will thus generate an enormous and rich library of business models patterns and managerial structures, provided on a platform, to support SMEs in these communities. We will also develop innovative tooling and provide them on the platform to makes it easy for SMEs to develop, evaluate and plan new business models. The ENVISION consortium covers Northern, Western, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In each region a top-ranked academic institution in the field of BMI is present as well as innovative businesses that deliver smart and tailored BMI tooling and reach out to SMEs. We build on over a decade of joint work on BMI and BM tooling. We will build and maintain regional and thematic communities. In the communities, support is delivered to help SMEs transform and improve their BMs. The consortium also includes partners and associated partners that will realize our pan-European reach to SMEs: on a pan-European level (e.g., UAEPME and female entrepreneurs’ network), on a national and regional level (e.g., chambers of commerce, family business organizations and statistical offices). The consortium also has linkages to EIT/ICT Labs and the European Service Innovation Centre (ESIC).