Could you briefly introduce yourself, your organisation and your role?

My name is Ilektra Karasante, and I’m part of the Remote Sensing Lab at the National Technical University of Athens. Over the past five years, I’ve worked on wildfire-related projects, mainly on data and model validation. About two years ago, I transitioned more into project management, and MeDiTwin was actually the first Horizon Europe project I took over, so it has been quite a journey for me as well!

Could you explain your project and the results you brought to the widerAdvance Facility in simple terms? What problem are you trying to solve?

Yes, MeDiTwin is a pretty cool project targeting the success and raising the profile of our lab for extreme events research. We have many capacity-building activities and joining the widerAdvance facility was a great fit for us. MeDiTwin stands for Mediterranean Digital Twin Network for Understanding Climate Extremes, and as the title might give away, we want to create a network working on Climate Extremes (CEON) leveraging the Mediterranean Digital Twin (MDT) we create. So we took those 2 KERs to the facility and began the dissemination and exploitation journey.

The Mediterranean Digital Twin aims to make wildfire modelling easier to access, explain, and experiment with, and CEON is a network bringing people together around climate extremes. So one is more about the technology, the other about the community, and for both, we want to find a way for them to live beyond the project.

What were the biggest challenges in turning your research results into something that could be used beyond the project?

Probably that our results weren't really… results yet!

Both KERs were still at an early stage, so we sometimes had to make assumptions about where they were going and what they could become.

But actually, that turned out to be useful because it made us think about users and exploitation while we could still influence their development.

What made you decide that this was the right moment to join the widerAdvance Facility?

I’m not sure it was the perfect moment for the KERs, but it was definitely the right moment for us.

Both KERs were still developing, so the Academy was also an educational opportunity for us. It helped us better understand exploitation and actually shape the direction we want to give to our results.

And that connects to one of my biggest takeaways: exploitation starts early. You don't need to wait until your result is finished to thinking about its users, value and future early on can actually help shape the result itself.

What kind of services did you access in the widerAdvance Facility?

We joined the Dissemination and Exploitation Academy, with three workshops and one-to-one guidance sessions.

The one-to-one sessions were probably my favourite part because we worked directly on our own KERs. We went from Ad-Libs and Value Proposition Canvases to building our exploitation roadmaps.

And now we're also concluding the Preparation to Match with Third Parties Academy.

Looking back, what has been the most valuable thing you have gained from participating in the widerAdvance Facility?

Again, exploitation starts early is our motto.

I also really liked the Value Proposition Canvas and especially the Ad-Lib exercise. Trying to explain your KER in just one sentence sounds simple, but it's actually quite difficult! We tend to explain what we've built and how it works, rather than who it's for and why they should care. That exercise really helped shift that mindset.

And I really valued working on our own use cases. Every KER is different, so it's one thing to learn the theory and another to sit down and ask, “Okay, but how does this actually apply to our case?”

That made the training much more useful for me.

How has the widerAdvance Facility and its services contributed to the valorisation process of your results?

We're not at the point where I can say, “Great, our KERs are now valorised!” They're still under development.

But we have done a lot of the groundwork. We've identified potential users and stakeholders, clarified the value of each KER and explored possible exploitation routes.

So when they're ready, we won't be starting from zero.

Has your approach to engaging stakeholders, potential users or industry partners changed?

Yes, especially in how we communicate with them. Different audiences have different needs, and that means different messages.

I’m now much more aware of the difference between explaining what we’ve built and explaining why someone should care about it. We should fit the KER to the users’ needs from the beginning, rather than build something first and then try to find a need for it, which means identifying, communicating, and listening to stakeholders. That is an investment of time, effort, and money of course, it is not so straightforward.

Our next step, Preparation to Match with Third Parties, will be a nice crash test for all of this!

Has the widerAdvance Facility influenced the way your team works together or plans future activities?

My colleague Georgina Spyres and I participated together, and we also joined each other's one-to-one sessions, which was really useful. One thing I would like to take from this experience back to our lab is to make exploitation more of a team effort, rather than something that falls to one person and becomes a bit of a box-ticking exercise for a deliverable.

For the actual exploitation planning of our KERs, it's still early, but we now have something concrete to come back to as the KERs mature. And it has already helped us think more clearly about how we communicate our results.

Do you feel your organisation is now better prepared to maximise the impact of future research and innovation projects?

Definitely. And I think this is something we can take all the way back to the proposal stage.

Instead of thinking about exploitation near the end of a project, we can already ask while designing it: Who is this for? Why would they use it? And what happens after the project ends?

That's probably one of the biggest things I'll take with me.

What are the next steps for your project and its Key Exploitable Results?

For the Digital Twin, once it reaches a higher level of maturity, we also want to explore onboarding it to Destination Earth, so it can continue beyond MeDiTwin and reach more users.

And for CEON, the goal is to keep building the network, the community and future collaborations.

Would you recommend the widerAdvance Facility to other organisations? Why?

Yes, I would definitely recommend the widerAdvance Facility, especially to university and research institute teams.

In research, we're very good at creating things, but sometimes the journey from “we created something interesting” to “someone is actually using it” is the missing piece. And I think the widerAdvance Facility really helps fill that gap.

And it is not about a few research projects but, I also really liked that the Academy promoted the involvement of Technology Transfer Offices and trained people who can then support other research teams and future KERs. That way, the knowledge doesn't stop with the people who attended, but it stays within the organisation.