Good practice:

RIS3 One Stop Liaison Office: supporting the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

Small, medium, and large companies use innovation regarding their business/production processes, products, or services as a way of boosting their performance and competitiveness. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often lacking competencies, know-how and resources and need to rely to a certain extent on external partners to reduce innovation risks and costs.
The RIS3 One Stop Liaison Office (O.S.L.O.) is an initiative to support the Region of Central Macedonia’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem. O.S.L.O. undertakes networking and collaboration initiatives, mapping business needs in the priority areas of the RIS3 Strategy and then organizing targeted actions to address them. In this way, it undertakes to support investment and entrepreneurship and to link research, innovation and new technologies produced in the universities and research centers of the region with the real economy.
SMEs and start-ups can rely on the complementarity of internal and external sources for innovation like Research and Development to be competitive on the global market.
The office acts as an information point and an instrument of mediation, while undertaking the completion of a series of procedures until the final approval and licensing of an investment plan. In this context, a digital platform has been developed that provides the opportunity to SMEs to search for a research partner, funding, or investor.

The RIS3 One Stop Liaison Office is financed with resources from European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) and the total budget is 1.038.960€. O.S.L.O. is operating under the Independent Directorate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Support of the Region of Central Macedonia.

-Supported 35 SMEs & Start-ups in searching for new funding tools. Depending on TRL, guided them in the appropriate financial instruments, such as Equity (Venture capital, Business Angel), Debt or grants (EIC Accelerator, National or Regional calls etc.),
-8 cooperation pre-agreements regarding technology transfer and alternative sources of funding, in the context of a B2B event.
-42 requests from SMEs for support in finding research partner
-OSLO initiated two interregional pilot actions

- Provision of a set of services that contribute to the implementation of the Smart Specialization Strategy by supporting the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem through bringing together businesses, academics, research centres, investors, Incubators and accelerators, government agencies, start-ups
- Leverage of public and private sector investment, exploitation of produced knowledge and innovation and creation new jobs by strengthening entrepreneurship
- Facilitation of SMEs and start-ups to have access both to research products and public and private investments
- Development of actions to bring new capital, mainly equity, to enterprises