The new venture between Mecklenburg-Vorpommern R&D and Continental wants to conduct research on the extraction of rubber from the Russian dandelion plant to use a sustainable alternative to the rubber from the rainforest. And not only this. There are plenty of other newly developed ideas and products which save human lives, improve Earth ecology, create new jobs and improve regional economy. All these new inventions are being developed in new start-ups, research labs, companies, scientific institutes or university faculties thanks to existing innovation environment., ELISE project has visited two regional clusters BioCon Walley and Life Science Nord that are located in the northern Germany regions Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein in order to learn what are their challenges, opportunities, experience and policies in development of innovation ecosystem. They have created ecosystem that facilitates communication between stakeholders such as researchers, innovators, producers, consumers and policymakers in order to find out best way for cooperation and optimal innovation process. Study exchange visit was organized in one of the main innovation hubs and economic centers of Germany – city of Hamburg. Partners from Italy, Poland and Slovakia came to exchange experience and find inspiration for their action plans. At the first half of the event, ELISE partners and stakeholders discussed in depth German good practices that were proposed during the duration of the project and partners had a chance to talk about them with German stakeholders that were originators of the good practice. All of the partners were very interested in the good practice called “Technology and Innovation consultant” – which is person who is innovation scout that has main purpose to Increase research, development and Innovation activities along the entire innovation chain. Thus, TIB is responsible for initiating knowledge and research transfer between the companies in the region and the universities. What is specific on this case is that TIB were situated at universities and brought significant results such as contract with Continental, which is mentioned above. ELISE partners were interested on 2 key issues: how to transfer this best practice and what is its sustainability. As it turned out with proper funding transferability is very easy and as concept brought results, some partners decided to put it into their action plans. As for the sustainability from 5 TIBs that were financed mainly form the ERDF; 2 remained as permanent staff at the university. It has to be pointed out that their role is partially in conflict with technology transfer offices and some of their competencies were absorbed by TT offices. The second good practices that was discussed was digital cooperation platform LSN XCHANGE, which is based on the inno-focus licensed and adapted inno-ecos platform. Here people - and not institutions - network with each other, innovation projects and working groups can set up secure workspaces through an authorization system, information can be exchanged purposefully and made available. This is innovative way how to manage stakeholders within the ecosystem and is easily transferable and also can be included in the action plan if necessary due to its very good cost/benefit ration. The second part of the event was focused on innovation and cluster policies in both German regions participating in the project. ELISE partners could understand the genesis of innovation ecosystem, what steps were taken, what is currently being done and mostly what are their plans for the future. This was particularly interesting for partners from Slovakia and Poland, where there are currently struggling with establishment of proper innovation policy. In conclusion ELISE partners found out that every country is struggling with similar issues namely overly high bureaucratic burden, lack of skilled people and difficulties with utilization of ERDF funds. Study exchanges such as this one are cornerstone of ELISE project and help us improve policies in all of the partner countries of the project. Meeting representatives of both organisations provided us excellent opportunity to discuss and understand how to create and/or improve such an innovation oriented environment and establish a regional organization which facilitates all the necessary activities essential for the process.
