BRIDGES Interreg Europe

WHATIS BRIDGES?

BRIDGES is about closing competence and infrastructure gaps and speeding up growth and jobs delivery in regions.

We will:

Break the vicious circle of regional lock ins, dominant in less advanced regions, and restricting the RIS3 impact.

Address knowledge asymmetries between innovation advanced and less advanced regions.

Bridge awareness, methodological and resources gaps between advanced and less advanced regions.

CHALLENGES

BRIDGES project is about challenges that regions face, deriving from the eﬀectiveness of their RIS3 implementation. The challenges addressed in BRIDGES are:

Mismatches between RIS3 productive & knowledge & research bases.
Distance from & better exploitation of research excellence as a path to further specialization.
Restricted resources towards RIS3, the combined result of which is shown in the weak impact of the RIS3 implementation. Issues 1 & 2, are very common in less advanced and/or peripheral regions, issue 3 is more relevant to innovation leader regions as they have much less structural funds than the less advanced regions.

HYPOTHESES

RIS3 is about innovation-based growth in regions. It builds on relatedness, embeddedness, and critical mass. While innovation leader regions are endowed –at least for the most part, with all three conditions, other types of regions lack one or more. Moreover, innovation leader regions might suﬀer from lock-ins not allowing their research to be fully valorised. With this background, BRIDGES makes two hypotheses:

Less advanced regions can renew towards more advanced status

by adopting advanced processes & seeking required knowledge where it exists, provided absorptiveness capacity is ensured.

More advanced regions can beneﬁt from new innovation partnerships

by diﬀusing their by diﬀusing their research & innovation solutions, leading to more income and possible new ﬁelds of research.

NEW innovation partnerships.

METHODOLOGY

POLICY LEARNING

Innovation absorptiveness capacity maps identify the innovation performing industries and businesses in the regions. Research opportunities from the innovation leader region outline the potential innovation partnerships with the less advanced regions.
Good practice exchange and transfer builds capacity coherently, around the innovation performing industries.
Regional stakeholder groups participate, analyse, support, and beneﬁt from the regional and interregional policy learning.
Interregional working groups to strengthen the good practice transfer and path out potential interregional cooperation after the project.
Action plans are formulated, peer reviewed, and endorsed by regional policy makers.

ACTION PLANS ARE IMPLEMENTED, MONITORED AND EVALUATED.

GOOD PRACTICE THEMES:

Industry-led centres of competence, as RIS3 implementation infrastructures.
Business innovation partnerships.
Leveraging of funds and interregional partnerships (multilevel synergies), strategic research to business partnerships and the tools to support them.

KEY FACTS ABOUT THE PROJECT

PRIORITY: 1.A. IMPROVING INNOVATION infrastructure policies

PHASE 1
policy learning
4. 2016 - 3. 2019

PHASE 2
policy implementation
4. 2019 - 3. 2021

PROJECT
BUDGET
1 978 468,00

7 regional
2 advisory
PARTNERS

REGIONAL PARTNERS

ADVISORY PARTNERS

POLICY INSTRUMENTS

RIS3 of all partner regions

SELFT DEFINED INDICATORS

Number of enterprises cooperating with research institutions
(PP1,2,3,5,6,7).

Number of research infrastructures / research institutions with cooperation agreements with businesses outside the innovation leader region (Uusimaa, PP4).