On the 10/04/019, the Inkrease project has been highlighted as a great example of a fruitful European interregional cooperation. At the “Europe, Let’s Cooperate!” event in Brussels organized by Interreg Europe, Bertrand Piechaczyk from Bretagne Développement Innovation (BDI – Brittany) casted a light on how Interreg Europe can improve regional policies and actions.
Throughout the Inkrease project, Good Practices have been selected, of which CRAFT, a public driven database launched by BDI, gathering the information of more than 9000 organizations, in 30 sectors, that improve competences matching, collaborations and cross-fertilization. This good practice has inspired the Action Plan of EcoPlus (Lower Austria), another Inkrease project partner. Indeed, CRAFT served as a model for creating new online platforms allowing for a better matchmaking and innovation policies, such as Lower Austria’s Virtual House of Digitalization.
Besides, CRAFT has been peer-reviewed during the project, and BDI worked on the lessons learned by its partners’ good practices, for example the “Competence Mapping Program” in Lower Austria and Emilia-Romagna’s “High Technology Network”.
Therefore, CRAFT has been improved:
- A marketing campaign has been carried out.
- A study about the users’ profiles and their requests has been made
- A training for those who work in the innovation system with contact to the company has been delivered to use the platform.
Finally, it has been included in Brittany’s Action Plan, to be developed in the next 2 years:
- New tools inspired from lessons learned will be deployed
- The semantic approach will be integrated, and the data will have an RDF format.
- The integration of widgets on the universities’ webpages will encourage the researchers to update their data.”
- A European initiative for a European database to match competences between laboratories and companies from European regions will be launched.
To sum up, thanks to Interregional cooperation, Brittany will pursue the development of its Database tool at a European scale, to facilitate collaboration and partner identification at European level. Used as a reference mapping tool on several sectors, CRAFT will be deployed in more than 17 regions by the end of 2019.
