Widening Countries (WCs) such as Türkiye, Poland, Greece, Malta, North Macedonia are falling behind in the rapidly evolving Alternative Proteins (APros) sector, which is crucial for addressing global food security and climate change. Closing the skills gap in these regions is essential for ensuring competitiveness and driving sustainable food innovation. The APRISE project focuses on enhancing the capacities of diverse talents in these WCs, providing advanced training and promoting collaboration to strengthen the APros sector. By uniting 18 partners from academia, industry, and non-profit sectors, APRISE delivers a comprehensive approach to talent development. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary knowledge transfer, including technical training in APros production, sustainable practices, and consumer science, as well as professional skills such as policy advocacy, project management, and entrepreneurship. Through secondments and structured training programs, APRISE equips talents to address sector-specific challenges and contribute to sustainable growth. Additionally, APRISE offers a Return Plan to support reintegration into home institutions, ensuring that the skills and knowledge gained are applied to long-term career development. The project’s efforts will significantly increase the capacity of talents across WCs, enabling them to play key roles in the future of the APros sector and ensuring lasting impact in both research and innovation ecosystems.

Public academic institutions are recognized as an actor capable of energizing entrepreneurship ecosystems to transform the business sector and strengthen the general welfare through sustainable entrepreneurship. Since sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation has been getting more and more attention, the USE IPM aims at encouraging entrepreneurship focused on sustainability, and creating innovative solutions that respect a three-norms framework: doing good, avoiding harm, and protecting both, the society and the planet. The improvement of the relationship between the academic and non-academic sector in widening countries will be achieved via implementing practices for gaining benefits with sustainability justification. This is considered highly valuable for improving the competitive posture for both types of institutions (academics and business) and making entrepreneurial ecosystem of widening countries more inspiring and supportive for new business ideas development. The primary goal is to enhance knowledge and skills of talents from widening countries in the field of research and innovation (R&I) and, consequently, to raise the capabilities of the widening academic institutions in order to increase their value regarding the sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem(s). Moreover, the USE IPM will contribute to enhancing the career prospects, not only of the talents involved in the project, but of other researchers at the widening sending institutions as well, as talents will share knowledge gained during the secondments towards the non-widening, EU countries. Additionally, the USE IPM will boost the entrepreneurial and innovation process management skills of business representatives by transferring the acquired knowledge and skills via trainings implemented though 4 directly impacted centers for entrepreneurship and innovation (onwards EI centers). These centers will be established and/or consolidated thanks to the acquired knowledge and skills, gained during the workshops at EU academic institutions. The main results of the USE IPM include: 28 seconded talents to 5 partners from EU countries (5 non-academic partners), 4 established and/or consolidated EI centers in 4 different widening countries, 200 young people (young USE IPM trainees) educated on the acquired acquis, 80 trained business representatives (business USE IPM trainees) in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation, 40 innovative solutions created during the internships, under the cross-sectoral teams and 10 best practices for cross-sectoral talent circulation identified. Last, besides contributing to the reversion of brain drain in their countries via increasing youth employability, the USE IPM will strive to improve a better gender balance in a male dominated, entrepreneurship sector.

The Talent Pass initiative is designed to: - strengthen the innovation ecosystem towards a borderless research, innovation (R&I) and technology market by addressing the critical need for geographically balanced talent circulation and increased cross-sectorial interoperability, as outlined in Action 4 of the ERA Policy Agenda (2022-2024); - cultivate and support cross-sectorial partnerships between academic and non-academic organizations that operate in areas of proven scientific excellence, particularly within the realm of the circular economy. The Talent Pass project aims to: - significantly enhance talent mobility and expertise development within circular economy, particularly focusing on researchers, innovators, and other R&I academic/non-academic talents from widening countries; - build a critical mass of competent researchers having the necessary high-quality knowledge, skills, and tools to drive forward innovation and sustainability in the circular economy; - improving access to excellence by consolidating an interdisciplinary network of highly skilled human resources and enhance the efficient utilization and valorization of complementary research capacities, infrastructure and results, aligning with the Horizon Europe Work Program (2023-24) - WIDERA and the Circular Economy Action Plan for a Cleaner and More Competitive Europe (2020); - bridge the gap between research and application and effectively translate advancements in circular economy into real-world solutions, by fostering collaboration between academia and industry. Talent Pass will subsequently focus on strengthening the research capabilities of WC institutions, ensuring they are on par with leading European entities. This will be achieved through strategic use of research resources (human, know-how and infrastructure) to foster capacity-building initiatives and targeted training and secondment programs addressing current and future challenges in circular economy.