The project addresses a common regional development issue brought about by COVID-19 pandemic, which requires European regions to upgrade and adapt their local innovation ecosystems in order to react to the changed innovation patterns.
These new developments have far-reaching implications for the traditional “place-based” regional innovation value chain that has successfully produced start-ups, high-growth companies, regional clusters, and key sectors. Hence, the project aims to enable participating regions adapt their innovation policy instruments to better support this emerging distributed-team innovation model and its key component – highly skilled mobile knowledge workers.
Through a review and adaptation of regional development policies, in view of regional competence in key disruptive technologies enabling this new innovation model (e.g., AI or cybersecurity); place-based and societal factors such as environment, lifestyle, community and the availability of family-friendly services; fiscal incentives for knowledge workers and companies; innovation support to less knowledge intensive sectors; availability of suitable innovation spaces; knowledge transfer interfaces from universities; and potential to support inclusion of marginalised groups into the innovation process, the project will improve the implementation of several policy instruments in the field of Smarter Europe.
As a result, the policy instruments will be more responsive to the innovation patterns and possess measures to attract and retain knowledge workers to their regions to ensure the vibrancy of the innovation ecosystem. The participating regions – because of the interregional learning, will be better equipped to:
- Provide the correct mix of space solutions, training and education to attract digital investment from start-ups, established companies wishing to expand and diversify and research projects/initiatives;
- Ensure the correct mix of incentives and innovation services to make the project regions attractive for high value mobile knowledge workers;
- Provide access to the disruptive digital services and technology needed to ensure the survival of companies in each region’s target sectors and clusters, and
- Improve the responsiveness, inclusiveness, resilience of the digital innovation ecosystem.
