A year of shaping FP10’s future, advancing INSPIRE™ for scalable impact, and launching projects like Roads4All and Sleeping Beauty. Grateful to partners and networks—here’s to building a sustainable tomorrow together in 2026.
As we reach the end of the year, we wanted to pause for a moment and share a few highlights from 2025. It’s been a year of big conversations in Europe about the future of research, alongside very practical work on the ground—turning ideas into tools, projects, and collaborations that can actually make a difference.
Before anything else: thank you. To our project partners, institutions, stakeholders, networks, supporters, and communities—your trust, time, and commitment are what make this work possible.
FP10 and Europe’s research future
A key thread running through the year has been the build-up toward FP10, the next EU Framework Programme for research and innovation (2028–2034).
Back in March, the discussion took a more concrete shape with a dedicated event at the European Parliament in Brussels, where priorities, challenges, and opportunities for European research—especially from an Italian perspective—were debated openly. That exchange was important not only for what was said, but because it confirmed how urgently Europe needs stronger strategic alignment between ambition, design, and delivery.
By December, the debate expanded further with our reflections on what FP10 might become and what Europe really needs from it: a programme that is ambitious, yes, but also clearer, more coherent, and better equipped to translate research into long-term competitiveness, sustainability, and strategic autonomy. In this context, we are proud that Andrea Ricci, Senior Partner and Lead Researcher at ISINNOVA, continues to coordinate and chair the APRE “Towards FP10” group, contributing to the European dialogue with analysis and proposals.
INSPIRE™ and the science of replication
One of the strongest lessons we’ve seen—across cities, regions, and EU projects—is that replication is not a slogan. Everyone wants solutions to scale, but in practice, transferring an innovation from one place to another is rarely straightforward. This is why, in 2025, we kept pushing a message that matters: replication needs method. Through our work on the “science of replication,” we explored how the conditions that make a solution succeed—governance, regulation, financing, culture, infrastructure—are different everywhere, and how ignoring that complexity often leads to frustration and wasted effort.
This is exactly the problem addressed by INSPIRE™, our decision-support tool that helps teams evaluate how replicable a solution is, where, and why. It doesn’t ask “can we replicate it?” in abstract terms. INSPIRE™ has been tested in multiple EU projects like RUGGEDISED, REGATRACE, and BIOMETHAVERSE across 12 countries and continues to grow as a practical reference for those who want replication to be planned, measurable, and credible—not just expected.
New projects: Roads4All and Sleeping Beauty
This year also brought the start of a new Horizon Europe journey: Roads4All. The premise is powerful and, in a way, overdue: road safety is not only about better infrastructure and better technology. It’s also about the culture behind everyday behaviours—values, norms, attitudes, and the social patterns that influence how risk is perceived and repeated.
Roads4All works to understand and shift that culture, creating models, methods, and practical tools that can help public authorities and stakeholders design interventions that actually resonate with people—especially considering vulnerable groups such as children, women, and older adults.
Another important piece of the year has been Sleeping Beauty, a Horizon Europe project built around a simple question: what if neglected and “forgotten” spaces—urban, peri-urban, and rural—could become assets again? Sleeping Beauty brings together Nature-based Solutions and the spirit of the New European Bauhaus, combining sustainability, beauty, and inclusion to regenerate places in a way that strengthens wellbeing, identity, and the relationship between people and their environment.
Resilience, soil health, and key networks
In 2025, soil health finally moved higher up the European agenda, with the approval of the Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive—the EU’s first law fully focused on soil, aiming at healthier soils by 2050. For us, this connects directly to a broader theme: resilience is not built with declarations alone. It requires monitoring capacity, shared baselines, and tools that make complex environmental issues measurable and manageable.
This year we also strengthened the ecosystems around our work. ISINNOVA joined the Urban Europe Research Alliance (UERA), reinforcing our commitment to sustainable urban research and collaboration across Europe. We were proud to be among the founding members of Ecosistema Futuro, promoted by ASviS, to help bring long-term thinking and futures literacy into Italy’s public debate.
Our celebration of the International Day of Cooperatives reflected a principle that runs through everything we do: cooperation is not a “nice to have”—it’s a strategy for resilience.
A final thank you
If there’s one thing we take from 2025, it’s that the future is not something you wait for—it’s something you build, project by project, decision by decision, partnership by partnership. So thank you again to everyone who worked with us this year: partners, stakeholders, institutions, networks, supporters, and all the people who helped shape ideas into action. We wish you a peaceful holiday season, and we look forward to building the next chapter together in 2026.
