Last 24th and 25th July the kick-off Meeting of the Interreg Europe project "SCALE UP" took place in Murcia (Spain). The seven partners of the project are: the Regional Development Agency of Murcia, Spain; Regionalmanagement Nordhessen GmbH, Germany; Regional Development fund on behalf of the Region of Attica, Greece; Lazio Innova, the regional company of European programs for innovation, Italy; Województwo Lubelskie, a Polish local public authority; Nottingham City Council, England and the European Association of Development Agencies (EURADA), based in Brussels, Belgium.
The main objective of SCALE UP is to contribute to European competitiveness and accelerate regional economic growth through the improvement of 6 policy instruments linked to business growth and robustness. SCALE UP is designed to support SMEs capacity to grow and to enable regional and local authorities to respond adequately to key obstacles which may hamper SMEs on their path to growth.
Over the next three years, the SCALE UP project will carry out four main actions:
1. Identification and benchmarking of best-practices about industry business scale up policies at local, regional and EU level;
2. Development of six regional / local Stakeholder Action Groups (SAGs) enabling project partners to engage stakeholders from government, business and academic institutions;
3. Organisation of interregional policy learning events and peer reviews exercises in the communities of the project partners with the participation of the project SAGs;
4. Development of six action plans based on the interregional policy learning platform to be then implemented by the project partners
Mr. Joaquin Gomez, Director of INFO Murcia opened the kick-off meeting of SCALE UP introducing the region of Murcia and the lead partner that he represents. Each project partner had the possibility to introduce himself to the project consortium. During the second day of the kick-off, the whole consortium discussed and agreed on both the methodology and the communication strategies to be used until the end of the project.
