Context
Rural communities across Europe face many challenges, but they also have strong potential for growth and renewal. In this context, innovation is crucial to help rural areas break out of these vicious cycles and build more resilient, attractive, and sustainable futures. Smart Villages have emerged as a way to support this transition, enabling rural communities to design and implement local strategies that bring together social, digital, and organisational solutions.
The second EU Rural Innovation Forum (EU-RIF), will take stock of progress, experiences, and lessons learned from the planning and implementation of Smart Villages in the Baltic region, showcasing hands-on examples and reflecting on how these initiatives can be strengthened in the future.
Organised under the Horizon Europe FUTURAL project, the event will be a networking opportunity bringing together stakeholders from the rural ecosystem, innovation networks, policymakers and implementers, EU-funded R&I projects, organisations, and entrepreneurs to support capacity building and expertise sharing on smart community-led innovation.
Objectives
This EU-RIF event aims to:
- Discuss and learn from experiences in the implementation of Smart Villages.
- Explore other examples of smart rural innovations (e.g. FUTURAL innovation, invited projects).
- Discover tools to empower rural innovators (e.g. Metasearch platform, business models, policies, governance frameworks).
- Discuss how Smart Villages and other smart rural tools should evolve in the future to fit the needs of rural communities.
To see the agenda, click here