News

New Report:
Smart Growth: Bridging Academia and SMEs in the Baltic Sea Region

Smart growth and eco-innovation should be strengthened in the Baltic Sea Region as it has the potential to be a globally leading green valley and health region. This requires enhanced coordination between various EU instruments plus more national and regional public and private investments. The key target is to enhance cross-border collaboration between small and medium sized companies and academic research. ScanBalt BioRegion today released a set of concrete recommendations at a round table discussion in Klaipeda, Lithuania, where infrastructure is being established to develop the marine sector based on science and technology. The recommendations are presented in the report “Smart Growth: Bridging Academia and SMEs in the Baltic Sea Region” as part of the EU FP 7 project Bridge-BSR.
Download the report here (PDF, 2.2 MB)

Hans-Robert Metelmann, Chairman of ScanBalt, says “ScanBalt BioRegion will strengthen cross-border support and services to SMEs and enhance technology transfer between industry and academic research. This should be further promoted by establishing a strong cross-border financing collaboration, network or institution supporting research, development, innovation and education – this is a task for the national and regional policy and decision makers in the Baltic Sea Region”.

Bo Samuelsson, Chairman of the Innovation Council preparing the recommendations and representing Sweden’s largest region, Västra Götaland, adds “For Västra Götaland as for other regions it is very important to have the recommendations as a tool box. We will now implement them via dialogue with key stakeholders around the Baltic Sea Region. Our ambition is to set an innovation agenda which leads to more and better investments. It is a step towards realizing the ambitions of the EU Baltic Sea Region Strategy”.

For further information please contact
Bo Samuelsson at tel. 0046-706 931 883, e-mail bo.samuelsson@clinchem.gu.se
or Peter Frank, ScanBalt, at Tel. 0045-27141078, e-mail pf@scanbalt.org

Background information
The recommendations were prepared as part of the EU FP 7 project Bridge-BSR, coordinated by ScanBalt and with the following partners: BioCon Valley, Latvian Association of Biotechnology, Steinbeis Team Northeast, BioForum Oulu, Estonian Biotech Association, IPPT-PAN, Medicon Valley Alliance.
Read more about Bridge-BSR

New EU FP7 calls out soon

As the National Contact Points have informed, the publication of the 7th EU Research Framework Programme (EU FP7) calls is announced for late July 2009. These new calls will also cover the priorities “Health”, “Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Biotechnology”, “Nanosciences, nanotechnologies, materials and new production technologies“, and “Environment”.

“We strongly recommend interested researchers and entrepreneurs to search for all available information already prior to the publication of the new calls,” states Frank Graage, Head of Steinbeis Team Northeast. In doing so, one will be able to develop topics, project ideas and consortia that may fit to the work programmes. Such preparational activities give additional time and flexibility to the literal proposal writing time of three months between the publication and the deadline.
Steinbeis Team Northeast in Rostock is open, willing and able to stand by the proposer`s side during the project preparation and - if eligible - also as project partner in a future project implementation.

For further information about the upcoming EU FP7 calls and a possible cooperation with Steinbeis Team Northeast please contact
Frank Graage:
Phone: +49 381 210 66 10
E-mail: graage@steinbeis-nordost.de