Quantum entanglement has the capacity to enable disruptive technologies that solve outstanding issues in: - Trust, privacy protection, and security in two- and multi-party transactions; - Novel or enhanced modes of operation of ICT devices; - Reference standards, sensing, and metrology. The development of entanglement-based strategies addresses these challenges and provides the foundations for quantum technologies of the 21st century. The practical exploitation of entanglement requires groundbreaking levels of robustness and flexibility for deployment in real-world environments. This ambitious goal can be reached only through radically new designs of protocols, architectures, interfaces, and components. Q-ESSENCE will achieve this by a concerted application-driven effort covering relevant experimental, phenomenological, and fundamental aspects. Our consortium will target three main outcomes: 1) Development of entanglement-enabled and entanglement-enhanced ICT devices: atomic clocks, quantum sensors, and quantum random-number generators; 2) Novel physical-layer architectures for long-distance quantum communication that surpass current distance limitations through the deployment of next-generation components; 3) Distributed quantum information protocols that provide disruptive solutions to multiuser trust, privacy-protection, and security scenarios based on multipartite entanglement. These outcomes will be reached through the underpinning science and enabling technologies of: light-matter interfaces providing faithful interconversion between different physical realizations of qubits; entanglement engineering at new scales and distances; robust architectures protecting quantum information from decoherence; quantum information concepts that solve problems of limited trust and privacy intrusion. The project builds on the outstanding expertise of the consortium demonstrated by pioneering works over the past decades, enhanced by a strong industrial perspective.