Focussing on change management in SME, the 3rd and last capacity building workshop of the SKILLS+ project took place on 21 March 2017 at Riga, Latvia. The event was opened by Deputy State Secretary Edmunds Beļskis, Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development of Latvia (picture). The following speakers, Signe Bāliņa, President of the Latvian Information and Communication Technology Association, and the Political Department Director and Member of the Board of the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Katrīna Zariņa, highlighted the importance of the country's digitalisation for its further economic development.
In the second part of the event, a number of good practices from different SKILLS+ partner territories were presented. Those included the Central German IT Cluster, Unified Customer Service Centres in Latvia, Technology transfer projects in the Czech Republic and successful ERDF interventions in Bulgaria. Finally, Latvian SME showed how digitalisation has been changing their everyday business habits. Speakers highlighted that digitalisation is not an isolated objective but that it must be embedded in the entire business philosophy.
The event was attended by more than 50 project partners and stakeholders from all participating countries. Further audiences followed the event's livestream. All presentations and videos (video 1, video 2, video 3) can be found online.
The seminar symbolised the achievement of the project's first milestone in which good practices were collected and exchanged in three seminars. In the upcoming months, each project location will be visited by a small international team to peer review the local policies and strategies in place to promote the digitalisation of rural areas' SME. The learning from the peer reviews will be used to elaborate Action plans for their improvement.
