The Study Visit took place on 14th of February in Magdeburg with the participation of various partners and stakeholders from: Municipality of Genoa (IT), Birmingham City Council, Anatoliki S.A. (GR), Government of Catalonia (ES) and the Hajdú-Bihar County Government (HU).
The study visit topics were discussed in the Development Bank of Saxony-Anhalt and in the Center of Expertise 4.0 for SMEs.
During the morning the first good practice was introduced:
eBusiness lotse
It was part of the "eCompetence Network for Business" initiative that was established and funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi) to improve the "culture" of security in SMEs throughout Germany.
The eBusiness-Lotse has offered internal seminars, meetings and consultancy for the resolution of specific problems on topics such as IT security, privacy, online marketing and optimization of business processes.
Experts stakeholders from the ”tti Technologietransfer und Innovationsförderung Magdeburg GmbH”, explained that tti aims to promote economic development in Saxony-Anhalt by making the scientific potential of research institutions accessible to companies.
They offer support in the creation of the network, protection of intellectual property (patent rights), formation of national and international business contacts, information on funding for research, development, innovation and electronic business transactions.
In the afternoon the visit moved to the Center of Expertise 4.0 for SMEs,
The Mittelstand 4.0 agency freely supports companies in digitization and work processes with training and information programs as well as supporting companies in identifying new business areas. The current offers of the agency are:
- Continuous determination of support requests (needs analysis)
- Implementation of interactive business games
- Implementation of events to illustrate technological developments
- Maintenance of topics in the social web
- Creating flyers, guides and brochures to present successful digitization projects.