Traveling to Bilbao
Bologna, November 26th
We took off from Bologna after 1 hour of delay, even if the sky was bright and the sun was shining.
Once in Munich, the obstacles weren’t over. After we’ve missed the connection to Bilbao, as broadly foreseeable, Lufthansa put us gently on another flight, but life, as John Lennon once stated, had other plans: it started snowing at 5 pm, so our flight was delayed by another hour and a half, and we got wings defrozen straight on the airstrip. We’ve touched down in Bilbao eventually, and it was raining, and the city center was shiny and empty through the raindrops, but we made it
At the heart of the meeting
The day after has found us in a positive mood: the sky was blue, a slight breeze came from the ocean, and the Euskalduna Building greeted us with smiling faces, a fashionable venue: we had the chance to shake hands and get acquainted with people we knew only from waist-up-skype calls.
Soon after we were in the middle of the morning session, where DG Regio and Grow and the Head of Territorial Development Unit of the JRC, were on stage, outlining and zooming in and out the strategy that lies behind the building and the desirable developing of the S3 Platforms.
S3 Platforms are built for experimenting new approaches
One point really stands out: S3 Platforms are built for experimenting new approaches, and for bringing the regional dimension and the place-based approach of innovation to match interregional needs and solutions, in order to exploit the building of European value chains. We can make it feasible by using two important means:
- a coalition of willing organizations (no matter the size of the partnership) that are able to gather technology partners and companies around a future objective (an ambitious but rather intriguing challenge)
- the identification of pilot projects that can scale up and providing evidence to feed into reflection for post 2020.
Integration among funds is crucial
In other words this new approach will give orientations and suggestions for the new programming period, while testing a context in which ERDF funds, private capital, other means (Component 5, mentioned several times) would be integrated.
Think it’s a good way for preparing the future.
Lunch time was a moment of delight, networking and toasts. Barriers and borders smoothed out by wine and fancy food (the real Schengen of souls), we got business cards exchanging, skype calls booked for the next months, and some serious discussions about the future of Europe.
Pain-points and good practices
In the afternoon testimonials went on stage to address some pain-points and good practices coming from the running experiences on S3 Platforms. Above all stands the evidence that companies’ involvement in the platforms should be fine-tuned with a useful TRL that companies can bring to the market.
The day was not over. A quick shower and we got ready for the Guggenheim Museum, where we discovered that 1) local development can be built on culture; 2) Picasso could paint like Toulouse Lautrec but not the other way around; 3) Giacometti was obsessed by the role of the male; 4) Red wine is not the perfect choice when you got a cold.
#StayTuned
