The Covid-19 crisis resulted in a 6.3% decline of EU economy and triggered unprecedented policy responses across European regions. Thanks to the additional funding of Interreg Europe, the regions of Brandenburg, Helsinki-Uusimaa, Kerry, Marche, Northern Ireland, Valencia, and West Pomerania reinforced and learned ways to tackle economic shock brought by Covid-19.
In search of a sustainable and socially inclusive recovery, the extended activities of the iEER Interreg Europe from October 2021 to September 2022 sought to answer:
- How do we as a region reboot the entrepreneurial mindset of entrepreneurs and stakeholders recovering from Covid-19?
- How digitisation and remote working, by and large, can support the growth of innovative business and sustainability?
- How do we recover and boost growth by encouraging social entrepreneurship and fulfilling ESG principles and the UN SDGs?
A gap analysis and environment scan in the past year has helped the region to identify the necessary actions to advert the impacts of Covid-19 on the entrepreneurial ecosystems in the partner regions. Plenty of knowledge was shared between the entrepreneurial ecosystem scanning process and the three interregional learning events conducted.
As a result, each region continues to implement some of the follow-up actions through a bundle of action plans. All action plans have been saved in the Document folder of the iEER library.
A number of recommendations are being proposed by this project to policy, practice, and academia, based on the desk research conducted together with the insights gained from the multi-stakeholder interregional learning events aimed at identifying the gaps for a post Covid-19 recovery in the regions. With the inputs of the gap analysis report, the iEER project consortium commonly identified three key priorities in developing competences of the regional entrepreneurship ecosystem for a sustainable growth to focus on
- investing in education for developing capacities and skills for sustainability and digital innovation
- developing business support and an impact-driven business entrepreneurial ecosystem
- enhancing the role of regions and the public sector to enable transparent monitoring and measurement aligned with the UN SDGs
For more information, please read the iEER gap analysis report, found in the Document folder of the iEER library.
