On 26 September 2019 AEBR entered into a Partnership Agreement with 8 partners from 5 different regions to set up the project INTER VENTURES: Policies to Promote the Internationalisation of SMEs for More Competitive Regional Ecosystems in Border Areas of the EU. INTER VENTURES is an Interreg Europe project with the aim to improve the implementation of regional development policies and programmes to support small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in all stages of their life cycle and to promote their internationalisation, especially with regard to business located in border regions.
In line with the objectives of Cohesion Policy, INTER VENTURES strives to enable actors in all European regions to have the chance to develop further. For border regions, this means to have the possibility to adopt a perspective of 360 degrees, rather than to be limited to act only on the territory of their own national state. By enforcing the context of the European Union and the Single Market, this project intends to help entrepreneurs in border regions achieve growth and engage in innovation.
The partners of the project, (HU), (IT), Rzeszow Regional Development Agency (PL), the Association of the Carpathian Euroregion Poland (PL), the European Business and Innovation Centre of Burgos (CEEI-Burgos) and the (SODEBUR) (ES), the Agency Klaipėda ID, the municipality of Klaipėda (LT) and the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR), will design and test innovative strategies to promote the internationalisation of SMEs.
AEBR, as an Advisory Partner, develops methodologies to execute the project and trains the stakeholders throughout the first phase of the project. Together, the partners will seek to enhance the capacities of SMEs to expand their businesses internationally, looking at the success and the particular needs identified in each region. At the same time, through this project also the institutional capacities and the governance models and support mechanism will be investigated. This procedure will allow to identify opportunities, cooperation structures and SME support schemes for boosting internationalisation in targeted border regions.
The partners showcase different level of economic developed regions, where the rate of internationalisation of existing SMEs varies. The results from the exchange and the collaboration among the partners will represent a real picture of opportunities to develop and grow, applicable to most border regions in the EU. The duration of the project INTER VENTURES is 36 months, outcomes and information will be released throughout the implementation period as INTER VENTURES aspires to create knowledge on SMEs’ internationalisation of use for many European stakeholders.
In the course of the first phase of the project’s implementation, AEBR has already developed three types of methodological guidelines that have been shared with the project’s partners. The first methodology –
Currently, AEBR is working on the next Methodology – Methodology of Action Planning – which will outline a strategy for the implementation of the Action Plans that each partner has to execute in order to reach planned policy changes.
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