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.

Europe still sees a quarter of the world's cancer cases each year, making cancer the second leading cause of death and illness in the region after cardiovascular diseases. Unless we take decisive action, lives lost to cancer in the EU are set to increase by more than 24% by 2035, making it the leading cause of death in the EU. Cross-border collaboration can address this challenge by combining data from various modalities and sources, extracting meaningful insights to deepen our understanding of cancer. However, ethical, legal, and national regulations, along with data access processes, including differing interpretations of the EU GDPR create significant hurdles. Technical interoperability issues across European cancer RIs, and patients' and citizens' rights to control who uses their personal information and for what purposes further complicate data sharing. The project will provide European researchers, SMEs, and innovators with a decentralized collaborative network, “UNCAN-CONNECT,” for cancer research. It consists of both technical components, a governance, compliance, and operational framework based on the UNCAN blueprint, with the goal of operationalizing it. The objective is to facilitate access to cancer data, promote open science, and revolutionize cancer research and treatment by co-creating an open-source federation of federations platform. It will be developed using specific use cases focused on six major cancer types: Paediatric, Lymphoid malignancies, Pancreatic cancer, Ovarian, Lung, and Prostate cancers and active collaboration with a diverse range of stakeholders, including researchers, SMEs, industrial end users, and citizens. It will build on existing European RIs such as BBMRI as well as initiatives like EOSC4CANCER, CanSERV, EUCAIM, to enable seamless storage, access, sharing, and processing of data across Member States and associated countries. This approach will foster interoperability and collaboration, accelerating progress in cancer research. This action is part of the Cancer Mission clusters of projects 'Understanding' established in 2022.

mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research project that addresses maternal and newborn healthcare delivery, a key requirement of end-user communities in developing countries, and priority area in both the 2015 Millennium Development Goals and Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Aligned with Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges, mHealth4Afrika will research and evaluate the potential impact of co-designing an open source, multilingual mHealth platform on the quality of community based maternal and newborn healthcare delivery in Southern Africa (Malawi, South Africa), East Africa (Kenya) and Horn of Africa (Ethiopia). Research and innovation actors from three European and four African countries will engage with local end-user communities (i.e. representatives of parents and local community leaders, Ministry of Health, healthcare professionals and volunteers, health oriented NGOs). Based on this User-centred Design, Living Labs, Collaborative Open Innovation based approach, the consortium will integrate and adapt · Multilingual electronic health records to store patient history, associated tests and test results; · Sensors to capture the results of a range of standardised tests for expectant and lactating mothers, unborn babies and infants; · Analytical and visualisation tools to facilitate the interpretation and monitoring of the patient results; and · Multi-lingual and multimodal mobile interfaces leveraging visualisation and speech synthesis to address literacy deficits and digitise data gathering through electronic forms. By focusing on accessibility, usability and integrated training, this will facilitate urban, rural and deep rural healthcare workers to adopt and use a comprehensive system that integrates quality community based healthcare delivery with telemedicine. The expected outcome is a multi-region proof of concept that can make a significant contribution in accelerating exploitation of mHealth across Africa.