Meet our Stakeholders

Jelena Rajher

The Everywhere International SMEs (EIS) project has many stakeholders all over Europe. Here you can meet a selected few who are involved in the EIS project.

Name: Jelena Rajher

Country: Croatia

Function: Senior Advisor

Institution: Ministry of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Crafts (Directorate for EU Programmes and Projects, Sector for EU Programmes in Entrepreneurship, Unit for Programming, Monitoring and Evaluation Programmes)

“My role in the EIS project was to provide information or inputs on measures that the Ministry is dealing with in order to support internalisation of SMEs.

It was very useful to take part in the meetings. Experiences from other countries are precious to us, especially in terms of implementing the measures dealing with internationalisation of SME's. Therefore it is interesting to hear about the issues concerning the internationalisation process in the countries involved in this project. Also, we hope that other countries will use our best experiences to implement wherever possible.”

Lucyna Formela

Name: Lucyna Formela

Country: Poland

Function: Development Manager

Institution: Gdansk Entrepreneurial Foundation / Gdansk Business Incubator STARTER

“We participate in the EIS project through the internationalisation programme for SMEs the ‘Pomeranian Export Broker’, which was presented during the EIS peer review in Gdansk.

In my opinion, peer reviewing is a very effective way of gaining insight from other organisations being experts in export issues in their regions. Their opinions and the various models used by them to support e.g. export activities can be very inspiring and add great value to what we do in our region.”

Hugo Serra Lopes

Name: Hugo Serra Lopes

Country: Portugal

Function: Director

Institution: ANJE

ANJE is particularly interested in the follow-up of the EIS project in order to be able to contribute to the design of the future community framework, and possibly to the reprogramming of the current one, in order to improve the effectiveness of support for the internationalisation of companies.

Sharing experiences with other European regions allows us to adjust our vision of the programs in a positive way and to add value to the advice we can make through our participation in the consultative bodies we are part of, namely the Alentejo Monitoring Committee 2020.

We believe that business associations have a key role to play in promoting business clusters, particularly SMEs, in order to ensure scale for the approach to external markets as well as support in the analysis of the business fabric.

Iwona Flis

Name: Iwona Flis

Country: Poland

Function: Vice President

Institution: Free Entrepreneurship Association Gdansk

“Our organization is a private NGO, and we are not directly involved in the EIS project. However, we cooperate closely with our Regional Development Agency in project called “Pomeranian Export Broker”. Furthermore, we are involved in an Enterprise Europe Network-project in our region. Both these projects help companies to export.

The Peer Review was an opportunity to gain more insight into how the other participants support internationalisation in their regions, what lessons they learned in the past, and what models they follow now. Further gains from the EIS-project may include a deeper understanding of the context in which all export supporting measures operate, and elaborating more complex and better profiled system solutions in our region and the other project regions. In other words, more efficient - and complementary - support in the internationalisation of European SMEs.”