HELIUM at the Interreg Day

The Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry for National Economy as Managing Authority (MA) of the Economic Development and Innovation Operational Programmes (EDIOP) organized an ‘Interreg Day’ in Budapest, 10th October, 2017, with the aim to provide a common platform for the Hungarian partners working on INTERREG EUROPE, CENTRAL EUROPE and DANUBE TRANSNATIONAL PROGRAMME international projects, which all have a direct effect on the EDIOP programmes. The event offered the opportunity to get acquainted with main goals, scope, and current status of projects and to receive an overview of collected experiences and GP-s, as well as having a personal liaison between the representatives of the MA and project managers.

All together 20 projects (UpgradeSME, ATM for SMEs, BRIDGES, ERUDITE, INKREASE, ClusterX 2.0, CLUSTER S3, CRE: HUB, InnoBridge, SKILLS+, HELIUM, HoCare, LOCARBO, RuralGrowth, TRIS, SHARE, Rural SMEs, ACCELERATOR, RI2integrate, FIERCE) were introduced by 10 different organizations. The common theme of the above projects, all co-financed by the Structural Funds, is to elaborate such policy recommendations, action plans and sustainable funding schemes within the 2014-20 programming period, which will enable a more effective utilization and application of regional, national, EU and other public funding schemes /development policy resources, and will foster a quicker market uptake of innovative products and services.

István Czizmadia, from the Directorate for Programme and Project Governance of the National Healthcare Service Centre (NHSC), gave an overview on Hocare and Helium Interreg projects, highlighting the relevance of knowledge sharing on adoptable Good Practices collected in the field of innovation and models of quadruple helix cooperation. Both projects look for, share and disseminate such GP-s, which already have succeeded in boosting innovation, based on cooperation of various partners, and resulted in new fruitful innovation models, or innovative solutions, services and products.

Participants shared both their successes and difficulties having faced so far, which is key to enable smooth project implementation for the future. Participants also articulated the importance to find additional resources/financial schemes besides EDIOP, as well as to consider the fast –track absorption of OP funds and the extent of already committed support when elaborating their Action Plans, as available support might be exhausted. All the above give a higher value to recommendations on the absorption of Performance Reserve for ERDF, ESF, and Cohesion Fund. These resources are currently blocked, but can be made available following a performance review planned in 2019, upon the meeting or exceeding of certain requirements. The Ministry for National Economy expressed to be open to receive project partners’ proposals to this end.

The event turned to be an active forum where the Hungarian partners could establish relationships with projects engaged in similar themes, which can create a closer cooperation and can result an even more effective elaboration of the Action Plans.

Referring to Hocare and Helium projects, based on the information received at the event, we plan to initiate contact with Hungarian partners of various projects like Erudite, InnoBridge and Accelerator, in order to exploit possibilities provided by the common synergies.

Further information is availabe at the following links:

Hocare and Helium projects are both carried out under the Interreg Europe programme, financed by the European Regional Development Fund, co-funded by the EU and the Hungarian State.