On 29 june 2017, the KISS ME project partners celebrated the project's successful Kick Off, together with around 45 interested guests and stakeholders at the Euregio Forum in Kleve. The European project partners were invited to present and share the approaches in their regions with the present guests from the Dutch-German border region. The backgrounds of the present guests were manifold and ranged from policy making, over business promotion, to academia. This offered promising impulses for the workshop sessions, which were held in the second half of the event. Within those workshops, the participants worked together on the following topics:

  1. How can the industry / businesses / SMEs be involvd in cross-border innovation processes?
  2. How can the future of SME policy in the context of INTERREG be shaped?
  3. What are effective national policy instruments to foster innovation, and can these instruments also work cross-border?
  4. What is the role of government / research institutions in innovation processes?
  5. How do cultural differences influence cross-border cooperation?
  6. Which tools are you lacking in your own organisation in order to make cross-border cooperation more successful?

The outcomes of the workshops form an inportant contribution to the project's work! If you are interested in the results of our workshop sessions, please feel free to contact us and we are happy to share them with you!

After the official Kick Off Meeting, the project partners and selected regional stakeholders were invited to join a site visit at ICER Innovation Centre in Ulft, where interesting insights into innovation and "2000 years of production" were gained.

The KISS ME Project wants to say "Thank you" for the active participation and the lively discussions of all the project partners, stakeholderes and guests who were involved in the project's Kick Off Event. We are taking a lot of input with us into the next project semester and are already looking forward to our next meeting in Croatia in October!