Program: H2020 Information and Communication Technologies
Geographical coverage: EU
Available contribution: up to EUR 15 million (30 EUR million available for topic)
Deadlines:
Deadline Model : single-stage
Rural areas represent most of Europe's territory (91%) and population (59%). When measuring against socio-economic indicators rural areas tend to lag behind urban areas. Lower population and business density make it more challenging to develop private businesses and public services in rural areas.
Rural areas are key to solve many of the big societal challenges such as climate change or the sustainable provision of food, biomass and energy. European rural areas are places of great assets and they can become more attractive if the provision of jobs, basic services, including health and care, connectivity, smart transport, and energy solutions, as well as a favourable climate for entrepreneurship, are ensured. Among the priorities to be addressed, overcoming the digital divide between rural and urban areas and developing the potential offered by increased connectivity and digitisation of rural areas must receive particular attention.
In particular, one key challenge is to overcome the barrier of missing interoperability of smart object platforms and service platforms that share and exploit data between them. This should trigger the emergence of a dynamic rural ecosystem, which in turn can lead to the development of cross-platform applications that ultimately contribute to increasing economic growth in rural areas and support their contribution to tackling societal challenges.
Proposals are expected to develop and demonstrate cost-efficient and flexible cross-domain applications through large-scale pilots. These should build on an open, API-based, interoperable and federated IoT architecture and include a reference implementation supporting flexible integration of heterogeneous services. Pilots should bridge the interoperability gap of the smart object platforms and create markets for service - and application providers as well as platform operators, supported by a vibrant ecosystem of developers, service providers and user communities.
In developing the pilots, proposals are expected to address all of the following aspects:
Pilots should follow an evolutionary agile, well-delineated, and lean approach. The developed platforms should be concurrently validated in at least three large-scale regional pilots in rural settings involving partners with strong relation to public authorities. The Pilots should propose scalable technical solutions capable of meeting social and economic targets relevant to boost new rural services and business.
Key performance indicators should be defined to measure progress on citizen's benefits in rural areas, quality of life, economic growth, job creation, new business development etc.
Proposals may involve financial support to third parties, particularly for SMEs. Conditions for third parties support are set out in Part K of the General Annexes. Consortia need to define the selection process of organisations, for which financial support will be granted. Maximum 20% of the EU funding can be allocated to this purpose. The financial support to third parties can only be provided in the form of grants. The respective options of Article 15.1 and Article 15.3 of the Model Grant Agreement will be applied.
The development of the pilots should follow a participatory approach using where appropriate well-functioning existing societal groups (including for example Local Actions Groups, Rural networks, public administrations responsible for Rural Development Policies) and liaise with territorial digital dynamic development. Proposal should develop strategic approaches that will help policy makers, rural actors, citizens and project promoters on the ground to deliver results, considering the comparative strengths and needs of their respective territory, to improve the implementation of EU policies in rural areas. When necessary, internet providers should be involved in the project to ensure connectivity, which is a prerequisite for rural ICT exploitation.
For this topic, the four activities described in the introductory section 'Platforms and Pilots' must be applied. Pilot projects are expected to contribute to the consolidation and coherence work that will be implemented by the CSA supporting the activities defined under the topic "DT-ICT-13-2019: Digital Platforms/Pilots Horizontal Activities".
For this topic, the impact criteria described in the introductory section 'Platforms and Pilots' have to be applied in addition to as many as possible contributions to the following impact criteria:
[1]https://enrd.ec.europa.eu/smart-and-competitive-rural-areas/smart-villages/smart-villages-portal_en