The green transition in the manufacturing sector is not only a technological challenge, but also a truly collective journey.
Since innovation emerges from complementary skills, resources, and perspectives, building connections becomes a priority. This is the principle that guided GREENSMARTMED and its quadruple helix approach.
By engaging businesses, research centres, public authorities, and civil society, the project helped strengthen collaboration networks across five pilot regions in the Mediterranean – Lombardy, Catalonia, Stara Zagora, Western Macedonia and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. The goal? To build critical mass around key innovation and sustainability challenges, fostering structured dialogue among the main actors of regional ecosystems and creating the conditions for a more effective and inclusive green transition.
To better illustrate this process, we decided to give voice to the key actors behind it: our partners, who have acted as facilitators throughout the entire journey. We collected their testimonies, giving rise to the Green Manufacturing Stories, a series of six interviews to share our three-year journey.
The interviews will explore the implementation of our methodology and the reasons why this approach has proven particularly relevant in supporting SMEs as they address the challenges of the green transition.
We will also discuss the establishment of the Regional Core Groups, where partners tested and adapted the methodology to their local contexts, taking into account the specific characteristics of each territory. We will share how these groups were created, which stakeholders were most actively involved, and how the activities contributed to fostering dialogue among diverse actors while encouraging the exchange of needs, challenges, and opportunities.
Finally, through these stories, we will reflect on the added value of transnational cooperation, a topic that is receiving increasing attention today. We will explore the lessons learned throughout the project and the potential for transferring our results and experiences to other regions and territories.
The Green Manufacturing Stories are more than a collection of experiences. They are a collective narrative that highlights how the green transition in manufacturing can be addressed collaboratively, through dialogue among territories, expertise, and diverse stakeholders, with the shared goal of making production systems more sustainable, innovative, and interconnected.
