DEVISE is arriving to the end. The partnership has exchanged knowledge, shared inspiring good practices and participated in a number of sessions to exchange lessons learnt with a wider European audience. Each of the partners has also produced a Regional Action Plan highlighting different actions that would impact regional policies. However, how has been the performance of these plans? Our Finnish partners share all the details.
During the DEVISE Final online Conference, held in June 2022, our project partner Juha Palomäki from Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (Finland), explained that the monitoring was carried out through two surveys that all partners responded per each action. The first round of monitoring was held in the Autumn 2021 and, the second round of monitoring was organised in Spring 2022. In addition, SEAMK prepared a separated survey for the companies that have been involved in the project.
In total, partners' RAPs included 19 projects or actions that have been tracked: MyMachine, TRAINING 4.0: XR, Food Living Labs Connecting People, DigiHub, Awareness and digital training programme for the retail and hospitality sectors, Technology Consulting Programme to support digital transformation of the retail and hospitality, Vouchers Programme, Digital Maturity Assessment Tool (DMAT) to support digital transformation of the retail and hospitality sector, Innovation as a Service (IaaS), and, Artificial Intelligence, among others. According to Juha, in 2021 13 projects had received funding and were in progress or ready to start. Furthermore, the submitted value of those projects was over 1M euros. A year later, in 2022, 15 projects had received funding and were in progress and the submitted value of these also incleased over 1,5M euros.
Asked about how COVID-19 has impacted positively and/or negatively to the companies excluding economical impact (e.g. digitalization), Juha mentioned that 67% of companies answered that the impact has been positive, 19% reported a neutral impact, and 14% highlighted a negative impact.
