6. EU Added Value

Rinnovate Index

This section should be a maximum of 2 pages.

Why is it important that your action is carried out on the European level - compared to a series of
local, regional or national actions? Please describe the EU added value of your proposal following the
sub-headers (a to c), which are the three sub-criteria of award criterion 4:

• A) Evidence of the benefit of EU collaboration:What will be the added value of this European collaboration compared to separate local or national actions? Is this collaboration clearly demonstrated in the specific activities of your work programme?

RINNOVATE will be of limited impact and in all probability will not gain enough momentum if it would be implemented at local level by single organisations. Even if all partners of RINNOVATE would implement a local edition of the project it would not work: it is in fact necessary to reach a critical mass of content, cases, users, customers, suppliers, etc, to ignite the effect of attraction and the subsequent aggregation of the community. Because of this requirement the project implements actions to overcome linguistic barriers and to encourage the mash-up of solutions coming from different construction and engineering cultures (e.g. the visual semantic interface and its tools). Beyond and more important than the issue of feasibility, are the ingredient of speed of action and sustainability of the project. Obtaining results quickly is essential to contribute to achieve Europe 2020-Energy 20 20 20 goals; combination of diverse experiences is a powerful catalyst of innovation. Partners of RINNOVATE believe that "novelty by combination" is vital to deal with the impressive variety of challenging cases that EU building stock put ahead. That's why the very first action of the project is to extend the participation further. The structure of the knowledge hub itself, aims at helping people to put together jigsaw pieces of the solution from different sources, regions, providers. Moreover - and very important, we want to capitalise the pull effect of procurement, which need overcome parochialism and fosters the formation of groupings from different EU regions (when appropriate). Lastly, the "memetic" approach to replication and variation is inherently cross-border and hopefully one of the principal factors that will make RINNOVATE a high-impact project also on the long term.

• B) Geographical focus: What are the exact target areas (countries, regions, etc) that your action is addressing? Why did you choose this particular focus? How is this choice in line with the action’sobjectives?

B) Geographical focus

What are the exact target areas (countries, regions, etc) that your action is addressing? Why did you choose this particular focus? How is this choice in line with the action’sobjectives?

RINNOVATE will address two geographical targets:

• the partners' regions
• the virtual community throughout EU regions.

The first group is identified in terms of NUTS codes as follows:

• ESPAÑA, ES1 NOROESTE
• Italy, ITE, CENTRO (I),
• Italy, ITD, NORD-EST
• PORTUGAL, PT1 CONTINENTE
• UNITED KINGDOM, UKN NORTHERN IRELAND

Reasons for this focus reflect the knowledge that partners have about the target areas and their capacity reach and influence key actors in it. In Spain, ITG and APPLUS work at national extent, but are barycentric in NorOeste, coincident with INEGA whose institutional scope is Galicia (ES11). In Italy partners address targets in Central-Eastern regions, with their centre of action in Ancona, Marche (ITE3) where TRECON and CNA Marche are based. TRECON extends its influence northbound to include North-Eastern regions. In Portugal INEGI works at national dimension. CST (University of Ulster) extends it influence to Northern Ireland.

The combination of regions covers a wide range of EU patterns in terms of climate, spatial planning and features of the built environment, cultural attitudes, energy consumption, degree of RES penetration, etc. The geographical feature of the partnership will help ensure effectiveness of local actions without losing EU-wide perspective about cross-cutting issues.

The second target has special features, because the object of intervention is geo-referenced but can be wherever in the EU (during the pilot phase we expect to see a concentration around partners regions again) but services can be delivered by community and project members distributed in different regions. Owners, consultants, integrators and suppliers working together on specific cases (e.g. procurement) will help to propagate the concept of ZEBRA (nearly Zero Energy Building in Renovation as a standard Approach) at EU dimension.

• C) Transferability: What are the potential and the conditions for transferring the results to those parts of the EU which are not directly covered by your proposal? What are your plans andactivities in your Work Programme to initiate this transfer?

The results of RINNOVATE are immediately available across EU. Beyond its visual semantic interface (which helps overcome linguistic fences) RINNOVATE catalyst environment set in WP2 is open to further improvements, localizations and to establishing information pipes to/from other sources, projects, services. In fact the entire WP5 and T5.1 and T5.2 in particular are devoted to this purpose.