Peer review in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Besancon and Dijon
How can we stimulate European businesses, knowledge institutes, and relevant partners to join forces to discover new ideas which could lead to innovation? That is the central question in Beyond EDP, a European Interreg project that the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region has integrated one year ago and its organizes its peer review the 5th and 6th June 2018 in Besancon and Dijon.
On the program of these two days: presentation of RIS3 and entrepreneurial discovery process, focus on good practices, study visits, taskforce and discovery of the region.
Due to the territorial reform, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté is a new region, resulting of the merger between Burgundy and Franche-Comté, in 2016. Indeed, French government has decided to reduce the number of the regions from 22 to 13 in order to create stronger regions, getting a sufficient critical mass to be more competitive on the international scene.
These two former regions have adopted a RIS 3 in 2014 after a broad involvement of stakeholders. For example, Burgundy organized two conferences (launch and final), several taskforces by specialization domains, which gathered enterprises, research institutes, clusters, policy makers, etc. and open surveys.
Five specialization domains had been defined in Burgundy (nutrition and health, materials, biomedical, eco-construction and mobility) and seven in Franche-Comte (mobility, energy, ICT, sustainable traditional food, microsystems, Microtechnique and luxury products). And, several challenges have been highlighted: strengthening the research excellence, developing partnerships for innovation, strengthening the transfer activities of public research and its impact on the economic, expanding the circle of innovative companies, developing human and technological skills for innovation...
The stakeholders, in particularly the clusters, implement tools to support enterprises, to encourage innovation and to discover new business opportunities as workshops of discovery entrepreneurial, B2B meeting, etc.
If the regions have merged, the operational program ERDF didn’t it. For instance, the projects are always selected via a call for expression if interest for the Franche-Comté territory. The leader must be a SME and the projects are analyzed according to four criteria: critical mass, innovation, territorial impact for the region, approach market.
The reform territorial has an important impact on the governance of RIS3. Moreover for several partners’ structures, which play a key role for development of innovation, either they had to merge or they had to extend their territory of action.
