D6.1 COMMUNICATION, DISSEMINATION & EXPLOITATION STRATEGY

The communication, dissemination, and exploitation strategy and plan aim to provide a clear overview of how all the communication channels and activities can work together to address the identified stakeholder groups.
The plan explains how and when the consortium will ensure the visibility of PUSH2HEAT as a project and maximize its impacts in terms of practical relevance, policy, market uptake, and research. Its activities will be discussed with the project partners on a regular basis to provide up-to-date information and guarantee that the project materials are accessible to all, as well as that the messages communicated and disseminated are consistent.
EHPA as the Work Package leader of PUSH2HEAT's WP6 (Dissemination, Communication & Exploitation of project results), will coordinate the implementation of the activities described in this strategic document. However, it is vital to highlight that the strategy developed will not succeed without the full cooperation, direct involvement, and support of the other Work Package leaders and all the project partners.

WP6 will contribute to ensuring the transferability and sustainability of PUSH2HEAT's results. This will include: contributing to the transfer of knowledge, raising awareness, and supporting partners in processes necessary for future take-up, scale-up, and follow-up.
WP6 will also take the lead in adapting the technical and academic findings into more accessible content. Such (re)framing will be carried out in close collaboration with project partners to ensure the project's communication and dissemination resonates with different audiences.
The work of this plan will be divided into three areas:

-Communication activities: the focus will be on promoting the project's activities and raising awareness of the benefits of heat upgrading technologies to a general audience, including decision-makers.
-Dissemination activities: the focus will be spreading the technical results of PUSH2HEAT to identified target groups and fostering collaborations with other related projects.
-Exploitation activities: the focus will be on ensuring the life-beyond-the-project of PUSH2HEAT's generated results.

The overall goals of the strategy are:
-To disseminate PUSH2HEAT's results through various channels and to adapt technical language and research findings into appropriate messages for different audiences.
-To raise awareness of the industry's challenges and benefits of waste heat recovery and heat upgrading technologies.
-To facilitate regular flows of information within the consortium while supporting partners in effectively communicating and disseminating their work.
-To contribute to exchanges of information and experiences between organizations and to enable partners to receive regular updates from the demo sites.
-To inform and raise awareness about PUSH2HEAT's progress so that the heat upgrading technologies installed in the demo sites of the project become examples for others to follow by disseminating the project's generated knowledge among relevant stakeholders at EU, national and local levels.
-To educate and influence relevant stakeholders with the goal of having an impact on technology uptake, research, and legislative framework development.
-To lay the foundations for the wide-scale roll-out of Key Exploitable Results (KER)

As the project has different development phases, the approach to communication and dissemination will be different across each of them:

-Phase I: Raise interest among key stakeholders: establish a common project identity and raise awareness and interest regarding the project's expected results and impacts. The creation of a PUSH2HEAT stakeholder group will be fostered since the early stages of the project, as well as the creation of an External Advisory Group (EAG) described in T6.4.
-Phase II: Enhance acceptance of Results: Focus on disseminating KERs and engaging with key target audiences to raise awareness of the challenges and clearly demonstrate the benefits of implementing the new heat upgrade solutions.
-Phase III: Foster uptake and replication of results: facilitate the market uptake of the KERs and ensure continuous dissemination beyond the project timeframe. D&E&C activities will be organized around specific working groups (WGs) representing the identified target sectors. Under the coordination of EHPA (WP6 leader) the WGs will support the development of dedicated content, key messages, multiplication opportunities, and outward platforms to reach the relevant stakeholders, early adopters, and enablers and make them aware of the potential of heat upgrade technologies, the scope and capacity for their improvement and the steps needed towards mass deployment