The first meeting of the Inno Provement project was an online meeting but on 24 October the time has arrived for the official kick-off event of the project. The project partners of the Inno Provement project has arrived to Budapest for the invitation of the Hungarian Ministry of Finance as the lead partner to get to know each other better and to receive important information for the first outputs of the project.
The project meeting divided into two half. The morning session was a closed steering committee meeting with discussions on the following tasks in the project and brief presentations by each partner about their organization, managed financing tools and selected thematic issue. After the useful discussions between the partners the afternoon session was a public event with full of interesting round table and panel discussions with the participation of SMEs and other companies and also with stakeholders which ones successfully implemented Industry 4.0 solutions in the daily work. In the first panel three Hungarian companies presented the work they have done on the way of automatization and digitalization and how they used financial resources from EU funds to do so. In the second round table stakeholders from Hungary, Finland and Portugal had a moderated discussion about what is the most efficient way to support these companies. The official kick off day was closed with a summary of the day.
On the days after the kick-off event there was the international annual conference of competitiveness operational programmes organized by the Hungarian Ministry of Finance for the 13th time. Most of the project partners stayed for the conference and held a presentation or participated in panel discussions of the event. One of the sessions of the conference was dedicated to the challenges of Industry 4.0 in preparing calls for proposals which topic was influenced by the Inno Provement project and had several participants from the partnership of the project among the discussants and also in the audience.
The kick-off day and the following conference was very useful for the partnership and the project partners left Budapest with a lot of impressions and information for the implementation of the project. The partnership is going to meet each other in the Czech Republic in March 2019. The partners are looking forward to present the first draft of their regional policy assessment.
