Two-year research project brings together 8 partners from 7 countries from research institutes, university, private sector and international networks in Europe.
WaterInnEU’s primary vision is to create a marketplace to enhance the exploitation of European Union funded information and communications technology models, tools, protocols and policy briefs related to water and to establish suitable conditions for new market opportunities based on these of offerings.
WaterInnEU will build upon existing knowledge bases and platforms developed in previous projects but will provide new concepts, connections, and components that are essential for a marketplace to work.
The primary goals can be detailed in four major objectives:
- Gather the outcomes of previous European funded projects, and contribute to their dissemination and exploitation to be used as an instrument for supporting the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD).
- Assess the level of standardization and interoperability of these outcomes as a mechanism to integrate ICT-based tools, and incorporate open data platforms and generate a palette of interchangeable components.
- Create the marketplace as a service: a forum formed by water research projects representatives, stakeholders in the water domain, and companies (in particular SMEs), who are capable of moving current products into the market and offer them to, for example, river basin managers, at different levels.
- Build an open virtual marketplace that will connect previous knowledge platforms as the Water Knowledge Portal of projects and research (WISE-RTD) and it will include EIP Water Online marketplace.
CREAF coordinates the project in cooperation with Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), Randbee (Italy), 52°North GmbH (Germany), Adelphi (Germany), Antea (Belgium), Orion Innovations (United Kingdom) and Global Water Partnership Central and Eastern Europe.
Global Water Partnership Central and Eastern Europe will coordinate work package testing solutions developed in other work packages in the Maritsa and Scheldt River Basins. Maritsa case study will start with stakeholder identification in Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish part of the river basin.
The case study will provide links between policy and practice through proofing virtual marketplace. In addition, learning products will be tested for different users in the Maritsa River Basin, including youth organisations.
An international seminar to present different products will be organized next year (2016) in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The results will be also developed into a case study for GWP Integrated Water Resources Management ToolBox.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641821.