This SME-led pilot is an innovation capacity building action to provide at European level a grant to visionary SMEs which have experienced difficulty in recruiting the relevant skills nationally. SMEs are supported to employ a highly-skilled experienced researcher e.g an 'associate' for one year from September 2017.

The call will address joint research and innovation proposals for developing and demonstrating advanced ICT Robotics based solutions for extending active and healthy ageing in daily life. Proposals should build on advances in this domain, and should combine multi-disciplinary research involving behavioural, sociological, health and other relevant disciplines.

Proposals should develop population-oriented primary prevention interventions to promote mental well-being of young people and assess them for their effectiveness. The interventions should build on but may go beyond existing state-of-the art knowledge on biological, psychological and social determinants of mental well-being such as societal, cultural, work life, lifestyle, epidemiological, economic and environmental perspectives.

Proposals should develop a proof of concept of radically new solutions for a personalised "virtual coach", building upon intelligent ICT environments, access to relevant physiological and behavioural data, new forms of accessible interaction based on tangible user interaction concepts, open platforms and emotional computing.

Recent trends in cloud computing go towards the development of new paradigms (heterogeneous, federated, distributed clouds) as opposed to the current centralised model, with tight interactions between the computing and networking infrastructures.

Europe lacks a systematic transfer of knowledge and technology across different sectors and there is an underdeveloped data sharing and linking culture. Traditionally, data has been collected and used for a certain purpose within sectorial "silos", while using data across sectors for offering new services opens new opportunities for solving business and societal challenges.

Learning today takes place in a context of new interactions between formal and informal learning, the changing role of teachers, the impact of social media, and the students' active participation in the design of learning activities. While there is strong demand for (user-driven) innovation in digital learning,