On the 22nd of November, the Lithuanian partner Kaunas STP has organized its 4th regional stakeholders meeting at Kaunas STP facilities, Kaunas, with the attendance of 8 members of the stakeholders’ group. The group represented a range of different sectors: universities, governance, business and innovation support segment what brought a different perspective to questions which arose during the meeting. Tomas Černevičius (Kaunas STP) presented the main achievements reached so far and underlined the role of the stakeholder group on project activities in relation, such as analysis of the regional situation, detection of good practices and their collaboration in the development of the Regional Action Plan, the main output of the project.
The introduction was followed by the discussion on internationalisation of SMEs aspects in Lithuania and Europe wide. Irma Bagdonienė (Kaunas STP) presented the list existing measures for internationalisation support provided by different organizations in Lithuania. Kaunas STP, which has a big pool of companies inhouse, also presented SMEs’ perspective to them with proses and cons indicated. Participants had a chance to express their own opinion regarding listed measures. To conclude with, all measures are functional and popular among companies and one or several of them should be submitted to Policy Learning Platform (Interreg Europe).
Later on, Irma Bagdonienė (Kaunas STP) made an overview of good practices approved by the Policy Learning Platform both by Kaunas STP and other partners of FFWD Europe. Following the steering committee meeting in Paris, held on the 16th of November, participants discussedd in which practices Kaunas STP should concentrate in. All parties agreed that Kaunas STP should keep deepening their knowledge in acceleration models and should find out more about FFWD Normandie, especially in terms of governance/EU support and switching the accelerator to self-sustained program.
The last topic presented and discussed by stakeholders was the acceleration program developed by Kaunas STP and its financial support. During the semester 3 one of the options developed is to extend the national project “Inospurtas” (Kaunas STP is a partner in it) by developing an acceleration program for innovate, R&D based SMEs. Main objective of the project “Inospurtas” is to increase the innovation of enterprises and to encourage them to intensify the development of R&D activities by providing innovation advisory and innovation support services to enterprises. Changes to the policy instrument could cause such extension. The proposal is still under consideration by the respective bodies. Participants discussed what steps should be made in order to foster the process.
At the end of the meeting Tomas Černevičius made an overview of the next steps in the project and proposed to have the next meeting in middle of the 5th semester.
