How does it work? How does it work?

Regional partnerships may develop their own working process. The work to be performed together by the regions, industrial partners and business intermediaries, and facilitated and supported by EU activities, can be carried out in three different phases:

Regions interested in setting up a new Thematic Area are invited to contact JRC. The regions can benefit from the service of a RIS3 expert helping them to develop a scoping note for the new interregional partnership. The scoping note will define the key objective of the partnership as well as a first draft action plan of the work to be performed by the partnership. 

Once the partnership has submitted the Expression of Interest and it is qualified as eligible, the partnership can benefit from the support of EU specific actions.

More information about the EU support actions.

Specific activities are undertaken such as mapping of existing and missing competences, identifying concrete opportunities for cooperation between regions and their stakeholders.

All relevant stakeholders should be involved in this process in order to explore business opportunities and examine concrete areas for investment projects. European regions participating in a specific partnership are encouraged to organise thematic workshops to concretise the areas for further cooperation between their stakeholders.

This phase would generally include 2 steps:

  • Mapping: by means of a survey to collect original data in the participating regions about the business actors present in the different parts of this value chain, the strengths of the research and relevant available innovation infrastructure.
  • Matching:  by means of analysis of complementarities and challenges and mobilisation of entrepreneurial actors.

More information about the relevant EU support tools.

Regions and member states work together with their stakeholders to identify and design concrete investment projects.

Such projects can be joint large-scale demonstrators, shared technology centres, other cross-regional projects, small projects bundled together in 'investment platforms', single cross-regional large scale projects, or large-scale individual projects to be developed across European industrial value chains. The organisation of partnering and matchmaking events for industrial partners will be important in order to discuss, facilitate and accelerate the development of joint industrial investment projects.

More information about the relevant EU support tools.

Industrial stakeholders supported by their regional authorities and EU support actions should develop a business plan and explore funding opportunities for financing their projects, looking at synergies among various funding sources.

More information about the relevant EU support tools.