Building resilience and accelerating transition to green and digital economy in Energy Intensive Industries

ended

Currently, Europe is facing highly turbulent times in the context of the unpredictable changes caused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, a significant fast-paced bottleneck in the supply of energy resources to the economy, in other words, an energy crisis, is firmly approaching. In order to tackle these challenges and provide sustainable solutions in long term with the goal of securing a climate-neutral economy, a disruptive innovation/transformation of the industrial value chains is needed, especially those of Energy-Intensive industries (EIIs). EIIs are responsible for generating more than half of the energy consumption of the European industry, thus causing a tremendous carbon footprint. Furthermore, EIIs value chains are deeply embedded and crosslinked with most of the other global industrial value chains. Digital and green transition are the key drivers for boosting such a change and securing the long-term viability of the European inclusive market. Both drivers are firmly embedded in the industrial strategy for Europe (European Commission, 2020) as engines with the utmost imope’s digital future. The Ingenious project will serve as a lever for the companies to implement highly innovative solutions, to penetrate key markets, to attract critical mass of partners and to obtain needed support in order to strive. Furthermore, Ingenious will support, develop and maintain the long-term cooperation of companies and other organizations in a cross-sectoral and cross-border way. This EUROCLUSTER will work together with other supporters like the European Cluster Collaboration Platform, Enterprise Europe Network, and European Digital Innovation Hubs but also with other Euroclusters projects (e.g., CircInWater) and other related projects to maximize the impact and to spread the knowledge. The consortium of Ingenious is in close relation with 63 other clusters all over Europe with a capacity to reach over 11.000 cluster members whereof more than 7.000 are SMEs.