Horizon 2020 is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe’s global competitiveness. Running from 2014 to 2020 with a budget of just over €70 billion, the EU’s new programme for research and innovation is part of the drive to create new growth and jobs in Europe.

Horizon 2020 Call2 will open in June 2014 and include the ICT10 topic Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation. The objective is “To harness the collaborative power of ICT networks to create collective awareness of sustainability threats and enable collective solutions”. The Call will include the four areas listed below, detailed with excerpts from the Work Programme.

You can also access here the presentation Fabrizio Sestini, Scientific Director at DG Connect, has deliver at the ICT 2013 event to introduce the CAPS Call under Horizon 2020.

  • Solutions to sustainability challenges harnessing network effects
  • Leveraging on innovative combinations of distributed social
  • Networks, sensor networks and knowledge co-creation networks
  • Grounded on open data, open source, distributed social networking, open hardware, mobile communications, integrated mobile sensing
  • Pioneering crowdsourcing/crowdfunding, social innovation (beyond GDP)
  • Involving existing communities of people
  • Addressing a combination of sustainability areas
  • Including bottom-up stakeholders such as local communities, grassroots, hackers, social entrepreneurs, students, citizens, creative industries and civil society organisations
  • Multidisciplinary: at least two entities from domains different than ICT technologies
  • Compact and small proposals
  • Better understanding of the obstacles and opportunities which are fundamental to the development of collective awareness platforms
  • Motivations and incentives for online collaboration
  • Impact of extended awareness and peer pressure in driving more
  • Sustainable behaviours and lifestyles
  • Defining online reputation mechanisms
  • Facilitating policy and technological developments addressing identity, anonymity, ethics, (user-centric) privacy preservation, monitoring of network neutrality, non-discriminatory access, collective governance (including Internet governance), new economic and value creation models beyond GDP, quality requirements for user-generated knowledge, visualisation of social interactions and trends
  • How to manage online communities in smart manners,in order to extract a “wisdom of the crowds” which appropriately takes into account the individual knowledgeability in specific fields.
  • At least two entities from domains different than ICT

The objective is to facilitate the transposition of existing or emerging participative and inclusive societal solutions to larger transnational scales through:

  • Engagement of additional stakeholders so far excluded
  • Concrete incentives for cooperation across countries and domains
  • Raising awareness about the effectiveness and best practices
  • Build on established and open multi-stakeholder networks and communities such as European Innovation Partnerships
  • Accelerating knowledge creation and innovation
  • Bottom up innovation activities
  • Address critical factors for successful demand-driven societal innovation
  • New collaborative business models across established disciplines and borders
  • Findings shall be transferable and scalable to other communities in different domains and societal challenges

Objectives:

  • To support and coordinate experimental and scientific activities in this field
  • To compare approaches and distil best practices involving and networking stakeholders from a rich variety of application, areas and disciplines
  • To bridge real world community-driven pilots of digital social platforms with multidisciplinary research (e.g. Internet Science)