enHancing dIgital and Green growtH in the Food processing industry via Interregional innoVation invEstments

ended

The overall goal of “enHancing dIgital and Green growtH in the Food processing industry via Interregional innoVation invEstments” (HIGHFIVE) is to foster, enable and facilitate SME targeted and interregional investment actions to implement or bring to the market innovative digital solutions to concrete challenges of the food processing companies and thus contributing to the Farm to Fork strategy. Therefore, HIGHFIVE builds upon and contributes to strategy and implementation roadmap of the S3 partnership SS4AF, with all cluster partners of the HIGHFIVE project being SS4AF members. More concretely, HIGHFIVE will 1) deploy a portfolio of three industry driven implementation projects that will serve as demo-cases and provide valuable lessons learnt for both the cluster partners as for other SMEs, 2) implement a voucher scheme to fund SME innovation investment projects across Europe, 3) provide customized individual and collective support actions to enable SMEs to overcome the hurdles connected to implementing innovative digital technologies, and 4) extract the results and lessons learnt throughout the project activities and to valorise them within the SS4AF network and transfer them to additional European stakeholders. The HIGHFIVE consortium covers 39 NUTS2 regions from 9 EU countries, ranging from more developed, over transition to developing regions, that will benefit from the project’s actions and outcomes. The HIGHFIVE actions aim to strengthen these regions via collaboration and sharing of success stories and guidelines. In doing so, HIGHFIVE will contribute to strengthening the European agri-food value chain and contributing to a more digital, sustainable and resilient agri-food sector in Europe. The project will run for 3 years with a budget of €11 605 782,81 of which € 9.398.801 (82% of the total project budget) is dedicated to tangible and non-tangible company support.