As we reach the end of the project, we have asked the project partners to summarise their main learnings and results from the project and how they have benefited from being part of an Interreg Europe project.
• What are the main learnings and results from the project for you and your region?
The project activities helped us to identify learning activities and good practices initiated by other regions that could be transferred and adapted to Lithuanian innovation ecosystem. In addition to this, we managed to create new connections with partners from all regions and their associated partners, some of them were consulting us on the improvements that we might initiate on Lithuanian policy framework. We learnt a lot how other countries are supporting and promoting eco-innovations in their industry, one of the key finding were that even small bureaucratic requirements can be a huge obstacle for companies to use public support services and that is hindering companies from the development of eco-friendly services and products. Therefore, one of the main results during this project was that LIC managed to reduce bureaucratic burden that prevented companies from using Eco-Innovation LT measure. As well, we learnt that eco-innovations could be a great feature that increase the competitive advantage of SMEs in foreign markets, as a result we introduced a financial support for the labelling and certification activities that are essential in the global market. These steps helped us to raised interest of SMEs to use structural funds for eco-innocation related measures.
• What benefits have Interreg Europe project brought to you and your region?
The main advantage of the Interreg Europe porgramme that it fosters the cooperation between different regions in the whole EU, thus it was a perfect opportunity to evaluate Lithuanian eco-innovations support ecosystem in relation to very advanced countries in this field such as Denmark, Sweden or Netherland. Even though each country or region has it is own peculiarities and different kind of governmental structure, eco-innovations are equally important to all of us, thus the Interreg Europe project gave an opportunity to tackle the joint challenges and do it in the very efficient way, as international consortium worked together to develop a self-assessment tool which increase the productivity in development of innovation support ecosystem. Without this tool and good practices that we found in other regions we probably wouldn’t be able to find the opportunities that we discovered during the project.
