This European Industrial Doctorate partnership entitled “Fostering Innovation Networks in a Digital Era” (FINDER) will prepare a new generation of business and entrepreneurship researchers who will contribute to the development of innovative ecosystems in a digital era, leveraging the academic and industry expertise of both organisations, and developing their research capabilities to trigger innovative aptitude that transcend beyond the boundaries of the financial services to other - currently less digitally savvy sectors and less affluent stakeholders – as example of inclusive innovation. The proposal addresses the way that networks of entrepreneurship can be fostered through activities and initiatives driven by large organisations in a manner that engages small FinTech start-ups as drivers of future innovation. To achieve this goal the early stage researchers (ESRs) in FINDER will be trained by prominent specialists (academic and non-academic) in the relevant fields within FINDER, with Radboud University, the Netherlands, as prime academic research institution, and Atos, a leading European information technology company, as prime business partner. Both institutions operate at the forefront of collaborative and innovative research and practice, as well as training and inspiring the next generation of business and entrepreneurship researchers and entrepreneurs in the domain of inclusive innovation. They are joined by three Fintech Start-ups from Europe, Canada and the USA, respectively: NGDATA, Voleo Inc. and Moven.

HUB4CLOUD will assist growing the impact and relevance of Cloud Computing research, innovation and policy-driven efforts, while accelerating its adoption and deployments in Europe. By running dedicated coordination and support activities, including roadmapping, dissemination, organisation of events, mapping of open source/(pre-)standardisation initiatives, and business acceleration activities, HUB4CLOUD will ensure the creation of an open, inclusive, and sustainable ecosystem. To succeed in its ambition, HUB4CLOUD, as a rather small project, will “stand on the shoulders of giants”, meaning it will build upon and together other relevant ongoing efforts (), engaging top experts (Letters of Support/Intent from RedHat, GAIA-X, CERN, GÉANT, EOSC, HELIX NEBULA, NESSI, OW2, FIWARE, IBM, etc.) and featuring an impressive mix of experience and skills brought in by strong and committed partners. HUB4CLOUD build on the core principles of agility and value creation. Agility because besides dealing with a moving target, the ECC is in continuous evolution, in the transition towards Horizon Europe short iteration cycles to generate outputs will allow to answer the need of the community (including the EC) more effectively. Value creation because without clear benefits provided to its participants, it will not be possible to engage stakeholders (internal and newcomers/external) in the European Cloud Computing community in a durable way. HUB4CLOUD ultimate ambition is contribute building “a Europe fit for the digital age” in which digital technologies and solutions are strongly rooted in the core European values, spanning fundamental individual rights to market openness and environmental sustainability.

The rapid transformations of our society to tackle the global challenges of our times, have posed a dire need for governments to profoundly change their modus operandi. As the long-standing e-Government goals of making services and data available online have faded, the new strategic direction evolves around an open and collaborative government model, based on the principles of effectiveness, efficiency, collaboration, transparency, participation and sustainability. In this context, Big Policy Canvas emerges to transform public sector to an effective, efficient, precise, consistent, and evidence-based policy making structure. Big Policy Canvas is designed in a methodical, scientifically sound and verifiable manner towards setting up the appropriate community and providing the necessary knowledge base and supportive material to be used by public sector bodies, practitioners and related stakeholders. Big Policy Canvas will deliver the necessary seeds for public sector organisations and related stakeholders to accelerate the transformation of the public sector through the identification and assessment of public sector needs and trends and an analysis and grouping of emerging methods, tools, technologies and applications, particularly examined from a big data oriented perspective, that hold the potential to disrupt the way the public sector nowadays operates. The mission of Big Policy Canvas calls on understanding and exploring both the technological and the socio-economic landscapes that will influence and will be influenced by advanced public sector performance, in order to guarantee not only the sustainability and effective utilisation of the solutions proposed, but also the nurturing of a more data-inspired, politically educated, smart and caring generation within and outside of the public sector boundaries that will work towards improving the overall life experience in Europe.

It is a fact that technology in our age is offering countless solutions that could change the way we live and act and that innovation is lately directly linked with emerging technologies that are applied in various domains. However, despite the investments performed in the last decade the bitter truth is that “we are not there yet” when it comes to fully exploiting the benefits of ICT to help the public sector to meet emerging societal needs. SONNETS will tackle this issue of empowering the public sector in becoming a core innovation driver by dedicating itself to the following core questions: • How to identify, monitor and early detect societal trends that need to be met by specific public sector services? • How to timely get aware of emerging technologies and assess their usability for the public sector? To provide convincing answers to these questions SONNETS will deliver an innovative methodological framework to accelerate the transformation of the public sector through the identification and analysis of emerging technologies that hold the potential to transform the public sector into a technology leader and innovation carrier. Thus SONNETS has committed itself to the mission to foster collaboration between all relevant stakeholders by breaking down knowledge silos towards building a more productive, responsive and innovation generating public sector. As such SONNETS is based on the following sub-concepts, which can be witnessed as a quadruple helix: • Needs Identification through evidence-based research approaches and methods • Innovations Identification and Gap Analysis • Impact generation through Community Building and Intense Networking • Innovation Transfer through best practice identification in multidisciplinary areas and impact assessment These activities will lead to the multidisciplinary development of a roadmap that will allow the public sector to grasp the role of the protagonist in a future of value added services which meet societal needs.