The Transeo General Assembly 2019 and 2nd meeting of the working groups was hosted by Transeo member "Reempresa" in Barcelona between 12-14th June 2019. Participants representative at the event included Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, Romania, Spain, France, Slovenia, Austria, Croatia and Germany.
The first day was dedicated to the topic "Business Transfer Marketplaces". Several of the working group's participants presented good practices from their countries, sharing both good and bad experiences and discussed possible business models for matching platforms.
The venue of the second day was "BizBarcelona", a fair for entrepreneurs and start-ups with the working group's tackling the topic "Business Transfer Ecosystems: Advisory services & complementarity public/private". A variety of good practice presentations from the participants regarding the thematic were offered.
STOB regions active contribution towards the event was delivered by Sandy Morgen of IHK-Projektgesellschaft mbH lead partner of the Interreg funded project, presenting the learnings from the STOB regions project regarding the topic of advisory services. After a short overview regarding advisory services in our partner regions (voucher systems, web portals etc.) two tools from the Berlin School of Economics and Law were highlighted as good practices with a high degree of transferability to other regions: the success-o-meter and the SME calculator. Both tools have a strong advisory character and can help to overcome some issues that have been identified by the participants, such as:
* high costs for entrepreneurs for advisory services
* mistrust against advisors
* e.g. micro-entreprises unable to find private advisors (not profitable enough)
Furthermore a multilateral discussion took place to identify if certification for BT advisors are necessary and how to formulate and facilitate a practical and standardized system. Another topic of discussion were the critical threats and opportunities facing BT advisory services, e.g. digitalisation, changes in legislation etc.
In the context of STOB regions participation, and besides the official programme, it provided a valuable and fruitful networking opportunity with other key influencers (other interreg projects and governmental representatives) operating in the sphere of business transfer at an EU-wide level.
For more information on the event and Transeo European association for SME transfer please visit the official website here.
To recap on the outputs of the Interregional partner meeting on the thematic of advisory services please visit here.
