On 19 June the KISS ME project partners officially presented their 4 regional Action Plans in Brussels at the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia to the EU. Meritxell Serret, Head of the Catalonian Delegation, welcomed the guests and stressed the importance of interregional cooperation for European integration.
After the warm welcome the KISS ME project partners presented their regional action plans containing concrete measures on how to improve the cross-border policy instruments in their respective region. The action plans present the outputs of the interregional learning phase, in which the project partners Euregio Rhine-Waal, EGTC Euroregion Pyrenees-Mediterranean, HAMAG-BICRO, Hedmark County Council and Värmland County Administrative Boar have engaged in within the last 2.5 years. In this interregional learning process, the consortium could exchange a lot of experience and was able to identify a number of good practices from each region, which built the basis for the action plans.
The event was rounded off by an insightful discussion on the future of cross-border cooperation with the KISS ME consortium, representatives of the European Commission’s DG REGIO and the European Committee of the Regions, and the other guest in the audience. The representative of DG REGIO highlighted the importance of trust building and initiatives to bring people together; also the CoR representative stressed the importance of continued, close cooperation between different regions, and aptly noted that, the more we cooperate, the more problems we notice - the more problems we can solve and the closer we get.
Now with the presentation of the action plans, the first phase of the KISS ME project is coming to an end; the second phase, running until June 2021, will be coined by the implementation of the action plans in each region.
The KISS ME consortium would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all project partners and stakeholders who have been involved in the process and helped to make the project successful. Besides its objective to improve knowledge and innovation strategies for SMEs in our European border regions, the project and the interregional cooperation within it also sets a great example for the importance and benefits of European cooperation in practice.
The presentations of the 4 action plans are available on our Website. Also the 4 regional action plans will be published on our website shortly.
