The overall objective for Adra-e is to support the ADR partnership in its full breadth. These include:
• Adra, as private side of the partnership
• The European Commission as public side of the partnership
• The larger ADR stakeholder community that is impacted by the partnership, notably the projects that are funded by the partnership, but also national (and regional) ADR initiatives and other related European initiatives (e.g. TEFs, NoEs etc).
The analysis made when preparing the proposal (submitted Oct 2021) was that the success of the partnership is critical for Europe, yet it is also a highly ambitious endeavor due to the holistic nature of ADR, and the fragmentation that exists between the involved stakeholder communities (AI, Data, and Robotics communities as well as industry and research). At the same time, the (diverse) communities that exist are valuable. They facilitate diverse viewpoints and priorities to emerge, which makes the European ADR ecosystem more complete, representative, and robust.
In close collaboration with representatives of the Adra Board of Directors, Adra-e was setup around the premises that this diversity is to be nurtured, but that bridges are to be built for an effective dialogue and action plan on European level. Assuring this balance and representation is therefore at the core of Adra-e. The Adra-e consortium includes partners from all stakeholder communities.
While the objective of Adra, and Adra-e is to create the conditions for an inclusive, sustainable, effective, multi-layered, and coherent European ADR ecosystem, there are challenges to overcome, including:
• Cultural differences, and different levels of maturity between stakeholder communities
• Interdependencies that exist between ADR topics (e.g. regulation, standardization, education, awareness)
• Breadth of the ADR ecosystem including nearly all industry sectors, and societal challenges
• Levels of granularity of the ADR ecosystem including regional, national and European and global dimensions.
The complexity of addressing these challenges is in the interdependencies that exist between them. Adra-e adopts a holistic approach to advance upon these by stimulating exchange between topic/domain experts organized in work packages through convergence events, recommendations to the SRIDA and the Adra-e web platform.
Adra-e counts 5 work-–packages (WP1 – WP5) that are structured around important topics for the ADR partnership, and 2 operational work packages (WP6 - WP7) to support the project.