XGain

New trends such as teleworking and e-commerce, as well as the need for a further increase of digital tools in all sectors (i.e., health, education, transportation, farming, etc.) demanded by the Covid-19 pandemic, are pointing out once again digital territorial inequalities, supply-chain disruptions and deficiencies in economic opportunities that hamper resilience and prosperity of rural communities.

Accessibility and connectivity are key issues to mitigate this erosion of socio-territorial cohesion. However, identifying a common solution for equipping rural communities with increased access to services, opportunities and adequate innovation ecosystems ensuring that no one left behind is a challenging task, mainly due to the diversity of challenges and needs of different locations. In this respect, XGain fosters a sustainable, balanced, and inclusive development of rural, coastal, and urban areas by facilitating access to relevant stakeholders, such as municipalities, policymakers, farmers, foresters, and their associations, to a comprehensive inventory of smart XG, last-mile connectivity and edge computing solutions, and of related assessment methods. The XGain overall project objective is, to deliver a Knowledge Facilitation Tool, facilitating business model development, supporting decision-making in the selection of an ecosystem of technologies, consisting of connectivity options and edge processing solutions, by following a multi-actor and practitioner oriented approach, and by coherently assessing their socio-economic and techno-environmental effects, aiming at: increasing systemic resilience and energy efficiency; contributing to climate mitigation; and reducing the digital divides between different types of citizens, farms, sectors and regions.

XGain will deploy, explore and assess digital connectivity options by applying a range of technological solutions to a wide spectrum of geographical locations and sectors. The main objectives of the project are the following ones:

1. Empowering public participation and multi-actor approach in transition towards enhanced sustainability design, social acceptance, and fair solutions, through the interactive identification of end users’ needs and co-creation of XGain system and Use Cases requirements.
2. To design and deliver a user-centric, interoperable, and easy-to-use knowledge facilitation tool, for supporting actors of rural and coastal communities in their decision-making process on internet connectivity and edge technology options with appropriate operational business models.
3. To develop, establish and facilitate the selection of the most appropriate innovative business models that will include systemic level and cross-sectoral approaches.
4. To validate the outcome of the Knowledge Facilitation Tool in 6 unique fields with different technical, environmental, societal, and economical structures and needs.
5. To accelerate the adoption of XGain solutions by the wider community and ensure impact maximisation to realise sustainable, balanced, and inclusive development of rural areas’ vision.

XGain is aiming to demonstrate the developed Knowledge Facilitation Tool and each application results in series of heterogeneous use cases in terms of location, connectivity needs, local needs, edge and connectivity potential solutions and operational business models, which correspond with the following ones:

1. Rural Community Services: Catalonia, Spain (Led by i2CAT)
2. Rural Services – eHealth: Central Macedonia, Greece
3. Remote Community: Isles of Scilly, United Kingdom
4. Farming and Forestry: Lithuania
5. Aquaculture: Dalmatia, Croatia
6. Livestock and Farming: Flanders, Belgium The initial business models provided for the use cases will also be evaluated as per the project methodology in parallel with the assessment of the proposed ecosystem of technologies.