Open Call: Co-creating Smart Solutions with Rural Communities

Deadline: 30 September 2024

The FUTURAL has launched an open call to encourage SMEs, startups, research organisations and rural communities to attract SMEs and other interested parties including start-ups, research organisations, rural communities (e.g., municipalities, regional authorities, development agencies, NGOs etc.) who can either develop and implement SS within the 5 domains or contribute to the expansion of the local ecosystem, capacity building of the community, and improvement of the livelihoods.

Aims

The FUTURAL Open Call aims to:
- Address a wider range of societal and environmental challenges related to the 5 FUTURAL domains.
- Harness the potential of using data from multiple sources and make users themselves part of the solution.
- Enable the transferability and accelerate the uptake and upscale of the digital smart solutions at a pan-European level towards sustainable and resilient rural areas.
- Enhance the FUTURAL meta-search platform by adding at least ten (10) more SS cocreated within rural communities across Europe.

Domains

Proposed solutions must fall within one of the following domains:
- Circular bioeconomy, biodiversity and ecosystem management
- Resilience to shocks
- Citizen Engagement and Quality of Life
- Lifelong Education and Training
- Climate Adaptation and Mitigation

Funding Information

The Open Call will result in at least 10 projects (max €120k euro per project – min €30,000 – max €60,000 per third party). In total, a €1.2m euro budget will be allocated to financial support to third parties.

Eligibility Criteria

Eligible stakeholders to participate in the call for third party funding include SMEs, start-ups, research organisations, rural communities (e.g., Municipalities, Regional authorities, Development agencies, NGOs etc.).
An automatic filtering to discard non-eligible proposals will be based on the following criteria:
- legal entity is established in an eligible for HE funding country.
- the consortium is allowed to submit only one proposal.
- a party can participate only in one consortium; If an applicant participates in more than one proposal, then all proposals will be considered as ineligible.
- Proposals are not pre-selected in the other projects’ open calls’ funded under the same topic (HORIZON-CL6-2022-COMMUNITIES-02-01-two-stage), i.e. RURACTIVE and SMART ERA
- Proposal includes at least one technical party SMEs, Start-ups, Research organisations) and at least one rural community (e.g. Municipalities, Regional authorities, Development agencies, NGOs etc);
- proposed solutions fall within one of the five domains proposals and address challenges in rural areas.
On top of that, the following will be considered:
- Existing consortium members of the FUTURAL project and their affiliated entities will not be eligible for the OC.
- The proposal must be delivered before the defined deadline (September 30th, 2024, at 17:00 CET), applying the requested submission procedure.
- Proposals shall only ask for funding for that part of the work that is not yet accomplished and will be carried out once having been selected for funding. Of course, this does not exclude the usage of e.g. results, IP, infrastructures or approaches already held by the applicants.
- All applicants must have a valid VAT number and must be active and operational. However, in case having VAT number is not mandatory according to the national legislation of the applicant’s country, a registration number from the respective national authority (National business registry, Commercial court or similar) must be provided.