TAF Talk Series: Capacity building workshop on financials and links between clusters and interregional projects

The TAF Talks series continues in 2021 and opens the year with a second workshop focused on capacity building. The workshop will take place on Wednesday 27^th January (10:00-12:00) and will cover two topics of interest for promoters of interregional investment projects being developed across the S3P-Industry. The topics will be presented in two sessions:

• Session 1 – Getting started with financials: In this session, you will learn about the first steps needed to get from a blank sheet of paper to an initial finance overview of the key figures of a project business model.
• Session 2 – How can your project benefit from European clusters? In this session, you will learn about the concept of clusters and how European clusters can be used to improve the business models of interregional projects.

The speakers for the two sessions are:

• Alexander Auboeck: Independent Project Finance Consultant with special focus on EU grants and subsidies, senior banking professional with over 30 years of experience in banking, manager of teams of up to 70 professionals, non-Executive Director experience on Board of banks, corporates, private equity funds and project companies. Alexander’s sectors of expertise are: management; project and infrastructure finance; public private partnerships; private equity; policy dialogue; EU policy and support mechanism (e.g. structural and cohesion funds; Horizon 2020, Connecting Europe Facility, Innovation Fund); technical assistance; international financial institutions. Alexander is also member of the TAF Selection Committee, with hands on knowledge on the strengths and weaknesses of successful and unsuccessful applications.
• Bianca Dragomir: Bianca was awarded by the European Commission as “European Cluster Manager of the Year” for her work as CEO of the Valencian Cleantech Cluster AVAESEN in Spain. Through her career, Bianca accelerated over 275 European climate-related startups. She is leader of the Spanish ClimateLaunchpad The Global Green Business Idea Competition and Founder of Spain’s first Smart Cities Think Tank, as well as of the first cleantech start-up accelerator in Spain. She is also co-founder of The First European Cluster Accelerator TheCAP and the Clusters of Change movement. She imparts her “7 Stepping Stones” scalable cluster business model to cluster managers, ecosystem builders and governments worldwide as a keynote speaker and expert. She has spoken in over 40 countries at innovation agencies, governments, universities, panel discussions and international events.

After the workshop, a short presentation on the key features of a successful TAF application including a technical Q&A session on the do’s and don’ts when writing a TAF application will follow.

For more details, see the agenda below.