NARRATE-HOP-ON broadens the scope of market disruption signal analysis in NARRATE project, and incorporates strategic advisory components for market positioning, encompassing assessment of systemic risks associated with import reliance on geopolitically competitive economies. NARRATE-HOP-ON introduces detailed mapping of global supply and demand at the detailed product group level, guiding firms towards markets with the most potential for boosting sales, exports, and market share. Incorporating these additional perspectives helps to identify additional supply chain vulnerabilities, demand disruptions and opportunities, boosting resilience and efficiency of the EU manufacturing industries. Three new demonstrators are developed: (1) Smart advisor for alleviation of critical import dependencies, (2) Smart advisor for the identification of export opportunities and (3) The predictive market analysis and early warning tool as an enhancement of the tool under development in NARRATE. The first two are additional tools integrated into the NARRATE eco-system. The integration of the additional partner enriches the original NARRATE project’s methodology by deepening the understanding of market structures, trade relationships, geopolitical risks, and economic dependencies. By incorporating these advanced capabilities, this approach not only improves operational efficiency but also strengthens the strategic positioning of European manufacturers in the global market, ultimately contributing to the increased economic growth and resilience. The new partner will also broaden the project's reach, particularly within Estonia, the Baltics and Nordics. Additional participatory activities and policy engagements are foreseen. At the same time, the new partner will benefit from the expertise of the leading partners behind the NARRATE project.

NIMBLE: collaboration Network for Industry, Manufacturing, Business and Logistics in Europe will develop the infrastructure for a cloud-based, Industrie 4.0, Internet-of-things-enabled B2B platform on which European manufacturing firms can register, publish machine-readable catalogs for products and services, search for suitable supply chain partners, negotiate contracts and supply logistics, and develop private and secure B2B and M2M information exchange channels to optimise business work flows. The infrastructure will be developed as open source software under an Apache-type, permissive license. The governance model is a federation of platforms for multi-sided trade, with mandatory interoperation functions and optional added-value business functions that can be provided by third parties. This will foster the growth of a net-centric business ecosystem for sustainable innovation and fair competition as envisaged by the Digital Agenda 2020. Prospective NIMBLE providers can take the open source infrastructure and bundle it with sectoral, regional or functional added value services and launch a new platform in the federation. Internet platforms need fast adoption rates and the work plan reflects this: we start attracting early adopters from day one and develop the initial, working platform in year one. Added-value business functions follow in year two and final validation at large scale, involving hundreds of external firms, will happen in year three. Our adoption plan is designed to enable two or more platform providers at the end of the project, and to have 1000 to 2000 enterprises connected to the overall ecosystem at that point. NIMBLE has 17 partners grouped around 3 main activities: developing the infrastructure, running a platform adoption programme, and validating the platform with 4 supply chains (white goods, wooden houses, fashion fabrics, and child care furniture). NIMBLE will give manufacturing SMEs in Europe a stable and sustainable digital ecosystem.

Democratized innovation holds undeniable promise for European producers, but the integration with corporate innovation practices is in its infancy. While the interest is real, it is still neither easy or efficient for producers – especially SMEs to benefit from collaborative production. The iPRODUCE project takes well proven concepts and approaches (from DIY manufacturing, FabLabs, Makerspace), and aims to upscale them through innovative technology solutions and to install them in well-connected multi-stakeholder ecosystems under an umbrella concept of collaborative Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities (cMDF)”. We organize our work under a social-manufacturing platform that enables multi-stakeholder interactions and collaborations to support user-driven open-innovation and co-creation. At the heart of the iPRODUCE platform is an open digital space supported by a set of innovative tools that cover matchmaking, secure interactions, generative product design, process orchestration, agile prototyping, usability evaluations and lifecycle management. We complement these technical tools with a strong social component that aims at easing the notorious hardship of engagement with makers and aim to open up to new maker segments, while we improve on SoA tools for Lead User Innovation identification. The iPRODUCE platform will be deployed in six local ‘ecosystems’ which cover different levels of maturity with collaborative production, diverse objectives and application areas spanning from home furnishing, automotive/mobility, consumer photography, medical ecquipment and more. The platform supports knowledge and resource sharing across cMDFs and all our results will be monitored and evaluated.

<< Background >>EQ-WOOD project-European Quality qualifications for the Woodwork and furniture industry-aims to contribute to the development of innovation capacity and competitiveness of the European wood and furniture industry, by designing and providing the Curriculum of a new vocational profile, Innovation Advisor. The curriculum is offered both as a Full Qualification, aimed primarily at young people, and as a set of independent learning modules aimed at the continuous professional development of workers.<< Objectives >>EQ-WOOD aims to boost the innovation and the competitiveness of the traditional woodworking and furniture sector at Eu level, facing the skill mismatching and the progressive ageing of the workforce. A new training path and an online platform have been developed to train young students, workers and unemployed people, able to generate innovative, sellable and production effective new products. At the same time, EQ-WOOD aims to create a sound sectoral network to exchange good practices.<< Implementation >>After a deep analysis of the sectoral training needs , a new Curriculum has been developed, identifying the KSCs, required to the new professional profile of the Innovation Advisor for the furniture sector. The Curriculum consists of 5 interactive learning units, tested by approximately 270 workers and students and promoted trough several Country events and through a final conference with institutional representatives and innovation experts. The training course is online, free and attractive.<< Results >>The new CV of the Innovation Advisor for the wood and furniture sector. The curriculum consists of 5 units useful for training the new figure who will manage innovation within companies. The e-learning platform and the innovative training course are available to everyone, free and without barriers. The course is entirely online with multimedia content and accessible insights. The project has created a stable network that will continue to cooperate in the future to develop other new training path