NOCHEMFOOD is a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) funded by the European Commission within FP6-research and development, under the Food Quality and Safety Thematic Priority. The project will pursue the following objectives:

• develop a novel class of food additives based on mixtures of vegetal-based extracts, with the scope of substituting some currently used chemical additives, which are subject to regulation restriction and might be harmful for human health.
• fully characterize these products from the chemical, biochemical and microbiological point of view with the subsequent attempt to understand their mechanism of action. The extracts will be also tested for their potential mutagenic properties as well as the antimicrobial capability against undesirable or pathogenic micro-organisms.
• demonstrate the effectiveness of these novel vegetal-based mixture of compounds as preserving agents in some largely consumed foods in Europe. Target foods selected for this purposes are sausages and other food classes which will be selected and preliminarily evaluated during the course of the project.

Innova is in charge of project management, exploitation and dissemination activities.

The main driving idea of the project is the creation of conceptually new type of scaffolds able to be manipulated in situ by means of magnetic forces. This approach is expected to generate scaffolds with such characteristics as multiple use and possibly multipurpose delivery in order to repair large bone defects and ostheocondral lesions in the articular surface of the skeletal system. The provision in vivo of the scaffold with staminal cells or /and growth factors in order to drive the tissue differentiation process and parallel angiogenesis represents nowadays one of most challenging requests. The Consortium aims to elaborate, investigate and fabricate new kind of scaffolds – magnetic scaffolds (MagS) - characterized by strongly enhanced control and efficiency of the tissue regeneration and angiogenic processes. Such a magnetic scaffold can be imagined as a fixed “station” that offers a long-living assistance to the tissue engineering, providing thus a unique possibility to adjust the scaffold activity to the personal needs of the patient.

INNOVA will contribute to the financial and administrative management, exploitation and dissemination plan development.

Active P53 is an Integrated Project funded under FP6 aimed at research in the field of P53 protein for cancer applications.

INNOVA is in charge of activities related to IPR issues and supports the project management.

The main objective of HoverSpill system is the development of an innovative procedure for oil spill emergencies, with the greatest immediacy and efficiency possible during the intervention and effectiveness during the following remediation activities. HoverSpill project is mainly focused to operate on the transitional areas between land and sea, where shoals, difficult access areas, long distance from ports, make difficulties more relevant. The project will study the best approach for the prevention and for the remediation and will use a specific air cushion vehicle, completely amphibious and capable of working on land and water, in areas with high and soft mud, which can be used as a pontoon in floating conditions. It can be transported quickly on the road and can be parked on land or beaches near potential oil spill dangers with no need of harbours or other special structures necessaries for traditional vessels. New operational procedures and protocols will be defined in order to match the new technological approach and the vehicle characteristics.

INNOVA is coordinator of the project and i also responsible for project management, dissemination and exploitation.

The Project aim is to collect and analyse research results on efficiency and energy management systems (EMS) and identify opportunities for integration and applications to further complex or cross cutting areas. The main aim is to provide guidelines for economical sustainability of the industrialization of solution based on R&D current results to be mapped through two main steps:

• An analysis of the technical and scientific basis;
• Further improvement of features following the cutting-edge technologies and the market requirements

The project aims therefore to improve the R&D activities on technologies to make content more intelligent and self-adaptive and therefore to improve the EMS environments by:

• Bringing together researchers and industrial partners of the EMS fields to explore potential synergies, joint exploitation or the identification of further shared research paths among past and on-going projects in the domain;
• Defining a draft agenda that will outline the envisaged steps needed to let the R&D results potentialities comply as much as possible with the real applications needs;
• Favour the market exploitation of identified/supported technologies through the access to private capital and other available financial products

The seismic behaviour of connections in precast construction systems has been largely recognized as a crucial matter to be addressed both by the industry sector and by the related research community. In spite of this situation, the complexity of the problem and the variety of inherent issues to be dealt with in proposing design procedures for connections and precast structures as a whole, have made it difficult so far to conceive self-sufficient solutions and approaches of general validity. The aim of SAFECAST is to give effective answers to this need of self-sufficient, harmonized solution of the problems of correct seismic design of joints and connections in precast structures.

The innovative aspect of the project is the unified performance based perspective in which the problem of the characterization of the seismic behaviour of connections will be dealt with.

The immediate expected consequence of the proposed project is to improve competitiveness of precasting, as a sector, to promote a general increase in the quality and safety of constructions offered to the market and end-users in general, to enhance the contents of precast building solutions in terms of quality guarantee, performance optimization, reliability and safety in the event of an earthquake.

INNOVA supports the coordinator in the project management.

The project ambition is to invent, design, synthesize, characterize, process, and to supply the missing materials in the fields of organic electronics and photonics and to develop appropriate patteming methods for micro and nano structuring of these materials that can be up-scaled to roll-to-roll technologies. The project is expected to generate fundamental knowledge and help to develop unprecedented technologies which will in turn heve a positive impact on competitiveness of European industries, environment, job creation, health, security, safety, and welfare of European citizens.

INNOVA will deliver training sessions on the management of the Intellectual Property to researchers and graduate students.

The NET-SHARE project intends to create, animate and manage a network of experienced ICT organizations, from several European countries, to share the experiences and knowledge on ICT initiatives and services for SMEs, gained mainly during participation in the SME domain of the former eTEN programme, and to make such experience and knowledge available for support to European SMEs, with a a particular focus on the promotion of wide and fast uptake of innovative solutions in microelectronic components, microsystems and embedded systems. The NET-SHARE project will address the following specific objectives:

• to set-up a network composed by experienced eTEN - SME domain - coordinators and participants, sharing common practices, objectives and work methods;
• to implement methods and tools for the sharing of experiences and best  practices on ICT initiatives and services for SMEs, training, development of specific approaches and standards and providing guidance for implementation of solutions in the SME market.

INNOVA will provide feedback about the experiences in eTEN/SMEs Support Project Overall Managing, Technology Transfer, Evaluation, Training, Technology Benchmarking and Technology Incubator. Innova will monitor and scout the best available ICT technologies on microelectronic components, microsystems and embedded systems, promoting innovative business models to invest in.

HYDRA, funded under FP6, aims to research, develop, and validate middleware for networked embedded systems that allows developers to create cost-effective, high performance ambient intelligence applications for heterogeneous physical devices. System developers are thus provided with tools for easily and securely integrating heterogeneous physical devices into interoperable distributed systems.

In the project, INNOVA is the work package leader of user validation and business model analysis and contributes to the preparation of the Hydra user application in the agricultural field.

GREX, funded under FP6, aims to create a conceptual framework and middleware systems to coordinate a swarm of diverse, heterogeneous physical objects (robotic vehicles) working in cooperation to achieve a well defined practical goal in an optimized manner. The project foresees the development of theoretical and practical tools for multiple system cooperation, bridging the gap between concept and practice.

INNOVA is in charge of conducting a market study on underwater robots applications and a technology exploitation plan to investigate the project’s potential applications.

Map-IT! Is co-funded under FP6. It aims to highlight the opportunities for research collaboration in ICT between Europe and the Mediterranean region. The project activities also include mapping and benchmarking exercises to identify key ICT players in the Mediterranean further creating an online database.

INNOVA is in charge of defining the mapping and benchmarking methodology, participate in the elaboration of the questionnaire addressed to target players, define work groups & expert panels and carry out workshops and reporting activities.

SOLAR-ICT, funded under the FP6, aims at facilitating joint collaboration between Europe and the Latin American and Caribbean region. The project identifies common developmental goals and defines a framework for strategic cooperation. The project involves the countries of Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in the LAC region and Italy and Belgium in Europe.

INNOVA acts as project coordinator, responsible for coordinating the project partners, as the mapping and workshop organizations in Latin America; in addition, INNOVA is responsible for the management of the project portal.

ImMediaTe aims at creating a sectoral platform supporting the innovative SMEs of the Digital Media and Creative sector by proposing a balanced mix of knowledge transfer, learning processes, investment attraction, and collaboration within clusters in order to unlock the potential of creative and innovative companies. In order this reach this goal ImMediaTe proposal will develop and test improved business support mechanisms with at least 250 KIS companies with a demonstrated growth potential. ImMediaTe will create the conditions for companies to be "investment-ready" and for investors to be "sector-aware". It will assist new ventures find and attract public and private investments, with special attention to international co-financing schemes.

INNOVA is mainly responsible for the assessment of research and skill needs of KIS Ventures, consisting in assessing the research and skills needs of KIS ventures in order to align the science and knowledge base to the entrepreneurial needs.

The INRES project aims to enhance the integration and the cooperation among three European insular regions, Canary Islands (Spain), Crete (Greece) and Samsø (Denmark) in the development of their regional RES policies and strategies through the establishment of a mutual learning process and collaborative relationships among regional research-driven clusters. The consortium, formed of 10 partners, targets the development of an inter-regional strategy, in the view of EC recommendations and support, for developing the take up of innovative measures included in the regional energetic plans that spin towards new collaboration among regional players, especially SMEs who are involved in the dynamics of the RES energy technology in the framework of a higher local economic efficiency and environment safeguard. Considering the previous experience in regional policies and networking, the project partners have decided to form the consortium based on the idea of putting together regional research-driven clusters dealing with renewable energy concerns and gathering entities from governmental, research and industrial side in order to address energy-related problems and create a common strategy for the development of renewable energy technologies, supporting finally the self-sustainability of the islands.

INNOVA is responsible for the regional assessment reports; the realization of the transversal activities such as template preparation, networking, learning activities.

The overall aim of the project, funded under the FP7, is to reinforce the dissemination and exploitation of project results of small and medium sized companies (SMEs) in the areas ECO-Innovation in such a way that they are supported to bridge the gap between research and exploitation, hence expand their businesses and, accordingly, raise their competitiveness in the world markets. The project will evaluate finished projects of 5th and 6th Framework Programme of the EU with the involvement of SMEs. By defining sub-clusters of ECO-Innovation (within biotechnology, food, energy and environment) the project will follow an interdisciplinary approach in order to support exploitation and dissemination of results in these clusters.

Through different type of activities such as interdisciplinary platform meetings at regional and EU levels as well as through specific road shows in partner countries, SMEs will be able to exchange good practices and to meet strategic exploitation partners. The results will represent important inputs for EC to reach the outmost impact and reinforce the exploitation activities of SMEs in Europe and to contribute positively to the creation of a lead market for Eco-Innovation in Europe.

INNOVA is responsible for the assessment and the clustering of SMEs in Eco-innovation.

The STARNETregio project has been conceived to increase the overall capacity of regional players in the regions Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy), Slovenia and the County of Rijeka (Croatia) to invest in RTD and carry out research activities in the marine industry, strengthening and developing the sector’s scientific and technological basis and ultimately the economic growth of the regions. This endeavour will be achieved by encouraging and supporting within the regions the performance of “regional research-driven marine clusters”, based on the triple helix model, associating universities and research centres (RTD), enterprises (industry cluster) and public regional authorities (PA).

The project focus lies specifically on shipbuilding, being an essential part of the regions’ industrial structure.

The project will contribute to reinforcing and improving the connections among multi-sector clusters of companies and research centres - mainly located in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, in Slovenia and in the County of Rijeka - to favour the development of innovation and competitiveness in the industry and service sectors of shipbuilding, yachting, marine appliances and related logistics.

INNOVA is a technical expert within the project and will take care of the cross-regional analysis and the setting up of the Regional Research Agendas for each region regarding their RTD activities and industry needs, fundamental to the subsequent elaboration of the Shared Research Agenda and the joint Action Plan. Furthermore, INNOVA will set up guidelines and templates for the methodological tools to be used within the project (e.g. elaboration of the questionnaire template for gathering comparable and efficient information from the research and industrial communities; structure of the final Action Plan).

RAF- REGIONS is a European project funded by the Regions of Knowledge Programme of the 7th Research Framework Programme. The objective of RAF- REGIONS is to increase the overall capacity of the Regions of Central Macedonia (Greece), Puglia (Italy) and Pazardjik (Bulgaria) in enhancing science and technology based economic development, focusing on the AgroFood Sector. The project partners comprise regional research-driven-clusters made up of Regional Authorities, SME Associations, Research Entities and Technology Consultants, all of them having the necessary experience and the institutional role to intervene and have a direct impact on research policies for the AgroFood sector.

INNOVA represents one of the three technology consultants in the project, taking care of the project activities to be conducted for the Puglia region. Main responsibilities include the performing of technology audits for the AgroFood SMEs as well as the mentoring of SME associations, regional authorities and R&D entities with regard to the state of research and technological development of the AgroFood sector in the region, including available funding mechanisms for supporting R&D efforts and possibilities for cooperation between R&D entities and the AgroFood sector. Furthermore, INNOVA is responsible for the development of the Joint Action Plan to be implemented following the end of the project. The Plan will support the sustainable economical development of the three participating regions by enhancing and exploiting their regional AgroFood R&D potential and the ability of regional SMEs to adopt research results.

WE-Mentor supports women active in R&D who plan to increase their participation in European research projects and trans-national cooperation. The mentee regions (India, Romania, Israel and Turkey) are trained on good practices in how to approach, motivate and facilitate woman entrepreneurs’ participation in EU RTD initiatives.

INNOVA supports the implementation process and the training activities.

Started in December 2007, the aim of the project is to develop a creativity and innovation management course, based on the principle that ideas and innovations are of great significance for Europe as a commercial location, and new product and service impulses are a prerequisite for the success of European companies on the world market.

The basis of the course content is formed by the "Marketing & Sales Idea Machine", a project that has developed a special creativity method for the generation of ideas. The involvement of young people in the creative process is a core element.

The project concept, converted into a (curriculum) course and circulated among partner countries throughout Europe, expands on some of these creativity methods.

The involvement of partners from the corporate world and/or from company-affiliated institutions, as well as from the training sector, initiates a mutual exchange of expertise and facilitates cooperation.

CREATIVE TRAINER makes sound training in the fields of creativity and innovation management possible for teachers and trainers in partner countries who are in turn best placed to utilize this expertise for training their pupils and trainees. This expertise is also intended to support the implementation of idea generation projects in companies. Well-trained individuals with qualifications in the fields of creativity and innovation management should be made available to commerce, and in turn through new ideas and innovations, raise the competitiveness of European companies.

INNOVA in the framework of the project is responsible for carrying out a training course in Italy and transfer the creativity modules to Italian companies, in particular to SMEs.

The major objectives of this Specific Support Action are to promote the role played by the Framework Programme in enabling International Cooperation on Global Change and Ecosystems research and to facilitate the uptake of the results of the research being carried out through a combined approach of awareness-raising and networking activities.

The project focuses in particular on two groups of Third Countries: Africa and the Newly Independent States since enhanced cooperation with these third countries would have a high impact on the implementation of both Research and Sustainable Development policies of the European Union.

The awareness-raising activities involve the dissemination of information on:

• the projects funded by the 6th Framework Programme in the Environment theme and which include partners from Third Countries;
• R&D players and networks in Europe and Third Countries.
• The consortium produces dedicated communication tools for this purpose, adapting them to the different target groups identified and disseminating them in the European Union, Candidate Countries, Associated Countries and Third Countries.

The networking activities aim to build interfaces/linkages between:

• the European scientific community and the Third Country scientific community;
• the scientific and the development cooperation communities;
• the network of National Contact Points to other networks in Third countries who are active in the promotion of the Framework Programme or could potentially play this role.
• The NCP community for environment, and related fields.

INNOVA is responsible for the administrative and financial management of the project, taking care of the day to day management of the project and acting as a permanent contact point for the whole consortium. Furthermore, INNOVA is involved in the awareness-raising process by identifying projects and networks dealing with environmental issues and including third country participants.