The service marketplace for European rural areas

dRural overall goal it to co-develop and implement a digital solution that delivers multiple services to rural citizens while creating opportunities economic growth and quality of life improvements.

Then, to ensure the successful exploitation and sustainability after the project’s lifetime and its replication in other European territories.As such, our aspiration is to become the service marketplace of reference for European rural areas. dRural will build a service network for rural areas and communities based on four rural regions of Europe, namely: Extremadura (ES), Dubrovnik-Neretva County (HR) and Region Gelderland Midden (NL).

Each of these settings are called regional demonstrators.

The solution building will follow agile methodologies and ensure end-users co-creation and validation in each regional demonstrator. Besides, dRural will be developed with a 'by-design' approach to ethics, privacy, and data protection. An internet coverage optimization in the demonstrators will be done to guarantee a smooth deployment.

Then, the solution will be set up in each region, guaranteeing its personalization and customization to the regional needs, and integrating with the local service providers.

In parallel, an ecosystem of relevant players surrounding the dRural solution will be created in each region by identifying the key stakeholders, current problems and designing a value proposition for each of them.

The ecosystem building exercise will be supported by an open call in each demonstrator leveraging financial support to third parties to incentivize the solution take up and expand the ecosystem of players involved.

This will offer opportunities for entrepreneurs by promoting new market openings allowing also smaller and newer players to capture value.

An evaluation of usage and impacts will be performed to ensure on-going support in the region after the project completionend.