The European Manufacturing Industry competitiveness and sustainability strongly depends on Innovation, targeting new consumer needs and societal challenges. This calls for significant public and private investments in R&D, but also a growing capability to transform the created knowledge into new products, processes, services and business models.Many of these challenges are multi-sectorial as the technologies needed to address them, especially in the area of Production Technologies. The EC has supported the development of such horizontal technologies through its R&D programmes, creating a very rich knowledge portfolio over time. However, its exploitation is recognised to be far from its maximum potential, due to many and complex factors including lack of information dissemination, competences, market access, resources, or simply because their cross fertilisation with other sectors is not evaluated.The main goal of EXPLORE is to unleash the full potential of this accumulated knowledge, by promoting its use in developing advanced products and services to address manufacturing industries’ challenges and needs. EXPLORE will promote and support the exploitation of R&D results, mainly by gathering resources to disseminate (models, case studies, demonstrators) and prepare commercial exploitation; cross-fertilisation, education and standardisation.Such challenges call for the involvement of different stakeholders, gathering complementary knowledge, competences and resources, as: exploitable results of European R&D projects; sectorial challenges and needs; national/regional, private/public funding sources; and a broad European network of partners.The most relevant results and impact are expected to be: higher exploitation rate of results; broader European coverage and impact of R&D+I investments; better alignment and coordination between European and national/regional funding; and a more competitive and sustainable European Manufacturing Industry and society.