On last 14th and 15th of October the GREENSMARTMED partner CUEIM attended the ENFA Summit 2024, held in Stockholm at the prestigious location of the Hotel Berns.
The Euro Nordic Funding Alliance (ENFA) is a Norwegian not-for-profit association with eight National Offices spread across Europe and the Nordics, which mission revolves around rendering public funding a more accessible financing solution for Startups, SMEs and Associations. By bridging connections between the Nordics and Europe and by harnessing substantial grants, the Alliance aims to catalyse similar initiatives within the Baltics, Ukraine, as well as other continents like Africa and Latin America, where there’s expressed interest in collaboration.
Given the great impact of this kind of networking initiative, CUEIM considered as strategical the opportunity to take part to the event, as kindly invited by the Italian ENFA representative Exeo Lab, to present and share the GREENSMARTMED project to a wider public of stakeholders in the framework of the activities realized to support the capitalization of the Interreg Euro-MED projects results.
Based on its previous experience with the Horizontal project Interreg Med Green Growth, CUEIM aims to provide the GREENSMARTMED project with a “community approach”, allowing all the stakeholders involved at regional level to effectively merge and exchange ideas, good practices and experiences towards common goals, such as the sustainable and green transition one.
The two-day event was realized as follows:
On the first day, CUEIM referents participated in several networking sessions, having the occasion to meet a multiple set of stakeholders representing organizations, start-ups, NGOs, research institutions and public authorities from different countries from Europe, Asia and Africa, ranging to Sweden, Denmark and Finland to Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia and Spain, until Turkey, Liberia, Kenya, Ethiopia etc.
The day was featured by different keynote speeches and panels from some of the most prominent innovation leaders from Sweden and Denmark, mainly focusing on the goal to attract impact-driven companies, eager to collaborate with other organizations on innovative projects and develop groundbreaking concept notes. This session was realized in line with the ENFA scope to promote the Nordic countries organizations, as long recognized for their investments in innovation (but currently facing challenges in scalability, market access and international partnerships) among European players which have successfully secured international grants, led large-scale projects, and accessed broader markets.
In this sense, CUEIM participation allowed to promote GREENSMARTMED, highlighting the potential impact of its methodology and tools and getting inspiration and useful insights from the comparison with referents of other possible approaches to green manufacturing innovation from the EU Nordic countries organizations, offering the project other perspectives for its future implementation.
Following these introductions, other two interesting sessions were realized, to present concrete projects and initiatives based on the collaboration of Nordic partners with African and Asia countries, highlighting the potential for collaborative innovation in this sense, and the great commitment of Ukrainian organizations, joining the ENFA to promote their initiatives and increase their collaboration opportunities to support civil society and economic growth.
On the second day, after a presentation of the main EU funding opportunities, among which Erasmus+, AMIF, Horizon, Cove, CERV and Interreg Europe, a working groups session was launched.
CUEIM referents, together with the other participants, were asked to seat at the different tables organized to discuss about possible project ideas, each one focusing on a different EU funded programme, as moderated by ENFA facilitators, to collect the concept ideas generated during discussions.
Once again, CUEIM had the opportunity to exploit its international experience in EU funded project to get and exchange interesting insights about the current EU programmes priorities, even more highlighting the further impact of projects such as GREENSMARTMED, whose core approach, based on an integrated methodology for manufacturing SMEs, proved to be even more “on track” in the confrontation with other organizations experience and participating startups and companies’ needs.
The event proved to be a successful experience for the project goals in the framework of its contribution goal to the Interreg Euro-MED Results Amplification Strategy as well as of its communication objectives, paving the way for further synergies and collaborations in the frameworks of other EU funded programmes and initiatives. Even more, the event offered CUEIM the chance to open a new window to new cooperation opportunities with other countries outside the Interreg Euro-MED cooperation area (even in other continents), to learn more about their needs and challenges and their successful strategies and initiatives towards green innovation.
In this sense, the regional approach inspiring the GREENSMARTMED activities, where a Quadruple Helix stakeholders involvement acts a guiding principle in its implementation, showed up as a successful one, well aligned with the more claimed request from all the diverse participants of this successful event for the effective achievement of development goals in different country contests.
CUEIM thanks the ENFA organizers for the great opportunity, with a special regard to Nicola Vita from Exeo Lab for its invitation as ENFA Italy referent.
For more information about the event and ENFA:https://www.en-fa.org/summit24
