Challenges
New trends, such as teleworking and e-commerce, as well as the need for a further increase of digital tools in all sectors demanded by the Covid-19 pandemic, are pointing out once again digital territorial inequalities, supply-chain disruptions and deficiencies in economic opportunities that hamper resilience and prosperity of rural communities. As the rural and coastal citizens are amongst the most vulnerable populations, every community’s resilience, competitiveness, and capacity need to be enhanced, to contribute to and benefit from the upcoming transitions in a fair manner. However, identifying a common solution for empowering rural communities with increased access to services, opportunities and adequate innovation ecosystems ensuring that no one left behind is a challenging task, mainly due to the diversity of challenges and needs of different locations.
XGain fosters a sustainable, balanced, and inclusive development of rural, coastal and urban areas by facilitating access to relevant stakeholders to a comprehensive inventory of smart XG, last-mile connectivity and edge computing solutions, and of related assessment methods. The XGain’s project overall objective is to deliver a Knowledge Facilitation Tool, facilitating business model development, supporting decision-making in the selection of an ecosystem of technologies, consisting of connectivity options and edge processing solutions, by following a multi-actor and practitioner-oriented approach, and by coherently assessing their socio-economic and techno-environmental effects.
Project Objectives
To empower public participation and multi-actor approach in transition towards enhanced sustainability design, social acceptance and fair solutions, through the interactive identification of end users’ needs and co-creation of XGain system and Use Cases requirements
To design and deliver a user-centric, interoperable and easy-to-use knowledge facilitation tool, for supporting actors of rural and coastal communities in their decision-making process on internet connectivity and edge technology options with appropriate operational business models
To develop, establish and facilitate the selection of the most appropriate innovative business models that will include systemic level and cross-sectoral approaches
To validate the outcome of the Knowledge Facilitation Tool in 6 unique fields with different technical, environmental, societal and economical structures and needs
To accelerate the adoption of XGain solutions by the wider community, and ensure impact maximisation to the realisation of sustainable, balanced and inclusive development of rural areas’ vision
Role in the Project
eBOS acts as the Quality Assurance and Risk Manager for the project and leads the technology validation and impact assessment activities. In particular, eBOS will:
Design, develop and integrate the XGain knowledge facilitation tool including its digitalization and visualization
Design and maintain the project’s website whilst will contribute to the elaboration of XGain dissemination and sustainability plans and present project’s results to key associations through its membership
Consortium
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
