South-Savo Region shows its specialisations to the EmpInno partnership
Colleagues from the Small Business Center of the Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences, located in the Finnish region of South-Savo, hosted the second project meeting from 13th-14th June 2016. Whereas the Nordic summer sun perfectly illuminated some of the regional priorities chosen in the smart specialisation strategy, e.g. the forest based bio economy and organic food production/food safety innovation, Tomi Heimonen from the associated organisation South Savo Regional Council did so in theory and practice during the meeting. He answered and discussed general issues concerning the RIS3 from the perspective of the “strategy owner” that has a long tradition of sharing the vision of strategies also with the public and local stakeholders (you can find more information on the smart specialisation strategy in the download section/here). Tomi also raised the question how in small regions, like South Savo, the innovation policy actors are able with small resources to encourage and establish an entrepreneurial culture to commercialize new innovations from laboratories and RIS process. The open discussion revealed experiences of the project partners, starting from new models of pop-up solutions to strategical entrepreneurship education policies of the partner regions. The partners further explored cooperation possibilities for their local companies in the six overlapping priorities of the partner regions and started to exchange on good practices of R+D transfer workshops as well as SME Empowerment tools.
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