The WaterInnEU project opens in Barcelona
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The European project WaterInnEU began at the end of March with a kick-off meeting at the Casa Convalescència (Barcelona) with the presence of the eight project members and representatives of the European Commission.
The stage for collaboration over the coming two years was set at the WaterInnEU project’s Kick-off Meeting, held on 26 – 27 March 2015. The objective of the project is to create a marketplace connecting results of European R&D on water with potential users. Through WaterInnEU, it is hoped that tools, protocols, and data produced by European research can be standardised, provided via open access, and that they are transferred to actors in the water management sector with decision-making power, or that they penetrate into the market in the form of products and services.
The WaterInnEU consortium is ideally balanced to address the topics identified in the call and produce the desired outcomes. The consortium is formed by two research institutions: CREAF (the coordinator) and Delft University of Technology, an international institution: GWP-CEEE and five companies: 52North, RandBee, Adelphi, Antea and Orion Innovations.
This project is addressing the lack of use and applicability of the research outcomes in the water management market from a different point of view and is offering an innovative and commercially driven solution.
The new perspective comes from the assumption that the lack of application is not only due to the lack of knowledge and awareness about the outcomes and the results of the research projects about water, but also to the lack of an appropriate and credible vehicle for accessing these solutions in a form that best fits the needs of the stakeholders and the associated supply chain.
This means a framework where the outputs of the research can reach the potential users (mainly managers and water administrations) in an applied and useful way, providing a practical and deployable solution that meets their needs and addresses their priority problems - what they need are solutions, not tools.
The project will develop a companies & SMEs pool and a water data database to be the core of the marketplace, but it will concentrate in creating a lot of services around it, as the provision of specialist commercialisation support services, the development of interoperability experiments, the creation of a standardization label and of mechanisms for user feedback, and the development of an extensive e-learning support services platform.
WaterInnEU looks forward to meeting experts in different fields of the water sector to enhance their knowledge and to test and share its interoperable approach. The two case studies are the Scheldt river basin (France, Belgium, Netherlands) and the Maritsa river basin (Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey).
WaterInnEU is financed through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Lluís Pesquer: l.pesquer@creaf.uab.cat
Photo: Joan Masó
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