Stakeholders from Hauts-de-France meeting on March
The Smart Con Europe stakeholders from Hauts-de-France met on March 31st at Euramaterials’ facilities in Tourcoing.
The main objectives of this second meeting were to review the project's last outputs and to assess the Hauts-de-France Peer Review evaluation in order to define what could be potential ideas of improvement for the ecosystem in its support to SMEs on European Research & Innovation programmes.
Participants called for a more “bottom-up” approach in the support of SMEs on EU R+I opportunities: many regional actors are offering awareness services such as workshops, infodays, communication on European calls for projects but a complementary work should be done in order to identify SMEs’ needs.
Another discussion focused on the necessity to have a more accurate picture of the SMEs that could fit in these programmes in order to have a more proactive approach in the awareness services.
Finally, the stakeholders stated the need to specifically support SMEs in the management and administrative tasks related to EU projects, as the lack of human resources to handle these aspects are often mentioned by companies as one of the reasons for not applying to EU grants.
Next step will be to introduce to the Hauts-de-France stakeholders the good practices identified by Smart Con Europe consortium in order to think of other improvement measures and to prepare the future staff exchanges, a project action managed by Hauts-de-France Region.
These fruitful discussions will be mentioned, by the Hauts-de-France Team and the Smart Con Europe Partners at the 4th Interregional Learning Event in Western Macedonia!
The participants to the meeting were:
- Euramaterials, an innovation cluster dedicated to material processing industries,
- CITC an IoT/digital/cybersecurity cluster that also manages the Hauts-de-France European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH),
- Pôle Énergie, a cluster that supports businesses in their decarbonization strategy,
- HDFID, the regional Innovation Agency that offers multiple services regarding EU R+I programmes and that is part of the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN),
- Hauts-de-France ‘Mission Union Européenne’ based in Brussels.
Participants excused due to internal obligations:
- Bio Economy For Change, a cluster dedicated to bioeconomy
- Eurasanté, a cluster dedicated to health innovation
- The Hauts-de-France Region economic department