In Emilia-Romagna, FGB and ART-ER selected two industrial research projects as CO-VALUE experimentations: REMEDY and MOVERT. The two initiatives were identified through a competitive call targeting ERDF-funded projects in Emilia-Romagna Region, and both rely on strong collaboration between academia and industry. Thanks to CO-VALUE, civil society was also brought into the process.

REMEDY aims at developing a customizable service for the remote monitoring of patients with comorbidities. It involves the development of a wearable device that, through a web/app is capable of collecting and processing clinical data. In the framework of CO-VALUE, Fondazione Bassetti designed and implemented a co-creation process organized in two steps.

The first co-creation workshop was held in November of the last year in Bologna. A group of 20 patients that were recruited thanks to the patients’ association APDIC (an association of patients with implantable cardiac devices) and took part to the participatory activities, providing concrete views and suggestions on the accessibility and usability of the app.

A second co-creation will be conducted soon (April 2026). Scope of this second exercise is to gather the citizens’ contributions on the handiness of the REMEDY device. A group of 16 citizens from the Province of Bologna (calibrated by gender and age) was recruited through a specialized agency.

All the results and outcomes of the process will be reported and delivered to the REMEDY research team in order to facilitate their inclusion into the R&D process, aligning the whole remote monitoring service to the patients’ needs.

The other CO-VALUE experimentation in Emilia-Romagna was conducted in collaboration with the industrial research project MOVERT. The initiative falls in the realm of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and its final goal is to develop a technological demonstrator of a highly automated electric aircraft with vertical take-off and landing capability (a drone) operating in urban and regional scenarios. Urban Air Mobility is a new transport sytem that aims at transporting good and/or people by leveraging the vertical dimension in order to reduce urban traffic congestion.

In this second experiementation, citizens’ were engaed in order to investigate the public perception of this cutting-edge technology. In a first qualitative exercises, 8 citizens residing in the Municipality of Forlì were engaged in a participatory workshop in order to collect their views, ideas and suggestions around the MOVERT technology. Before diving into the discussion, the participants tested the drone through a VR simulator, which was a very important step in order to properly frame the discussion. The results from the workshop are now being used by Fondazione Bassetti in order to shape a survey, which will be administred to a rapresentative sample of 800 Emilia-Romagna citizens by the end of April.

The quantative and qualitative results collected respectively from the survey and from the workshop will complement each other, providing a picture on how this technology is perceived by the general public and what kind of efforts should be made in order direct the research process so that it is aligned to citizens’ needs and views.

All the outcomes of the CO-VALUE process will be delivered to the MOVERT research team, which will take them into account in future research actions.

In this context, the role of organisations such as ART-ER and PCA is crucial in raising awareness among intermediaries and supporting the ecosystem in integrating citizen engagement into day-to-day activities. These public organisations act as ‘stakeholder promoters’, facilitating the achievement of results. It is essential that technology clusters and incubators also become fully aware of these initiatives, taking an active role in supporting the implementation of the workshops.