September 14, 2023

Launching the two new SmartAgriHubs open calls

In accordance to the current COVID-19 related situation and the importance of the food system’s resilience, the SmartAgriHubs project launched a open call in May 2020. In order to following-up, SmartAgriHubs has launched RESTART and EXPAND open calls that addresses the agrifood economy on the medium term. It has assigned up to 5,000,000€ funding to the RESTART and EXPAND open calls, addressing Digital Innovation Hubs that are supporting diverse stakeholders in the agrifood economy and specifically SMEs as drivers for digital innovation.

RESTART the Economy around Food Systems

This open call is focused for hackathon type of activities that will RESTART the economy around the agrifood related sectors and affected food systems. The main objective is to generate ideas for potential Innovation Experiments that can then be realised by related teams and that go beyond initial conceptual implementations. Generally, such activities shall facilitate networking of organisations and individuals, aimed at the mobilisation of talent and enable the realisation of digital innovations that address current challenges, opportunities and threats.

EXPAND the network

The major amount of funding will be assigned to the implementation of programmes by DIHs to support the realisation of Innovation Experiments. This shall specifically contribute to the expansion of the network of DIHs and CCs as well as making available new knowledge and results from digital innovation activities. The EXPAND the Network open call is specifically targeting at DIHs as the main proposers thereby facilitating the realisation of innovation experiments, while the services of CCs would be logically consumed when implementing an innovation experiment. The main objective is to stimulate initiatives involving all of those and even fostering the collaboration of different type of DIHs, engaging DIHs with diverse maturity levels, to elaborate blueprints to facilitate the expansion of the community.

Proposals are called under a continuous submission scheme. Proposals will be evaluated after reception in varying intervals after the open call publishing. The intervals will be regularly communicated via the open call website. Currently, it is planned to close all open calls latest on July, 28th 2021, 17:00 h CEST, or at an earlier date, in case the budget that is reserved for open calls in SmartAgriHubs (i.e. for this and other SAH open calls) is completely allocated.

More information

EXPAND open call fiche

RESTART open call fiche