SMEs are the blood cells for a vivid EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region

SMEs are the blood cells for a vivid EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, with a strong impact to all horizontal actions. In order to keep on nurturing economic growth and welfare in the Baltic Sea Region, our SMEs need support in the most important task of a knowledge society:creating innovation. The Baltic Sea Region Programme acknowledged the importance of this and initiated the cluster “Innovation in SMEs”, consisting of 12 projects with more than 200 project partners in total. One of the projects is also BSR Health Port.

Within the cluster “Innovation in SMEs”, initiated by the Baltic Sea Region Programme, several evaluations and a wide-ranging survey among more than 600 business organisations, universities and administrations were conducted. It has been confirmed, how important different kinds of innovations are, that it is essential to introduce them to markets, support SMEs in selling their ideas.

The survey demonstrates also, how important the transregional cooperation with R&D institutions and business organizations is to develop innovative solutions. Most evident is a high need for qualifications in SMEs. Regarding future markets, besides Energy the Health/Life Science sector has been mentioned most often. To learn more about the cluster, please visit www.bsr-innovation.eu.