Coventry & Warwickshire Growth Hub help drive Interreg Project INTRA!

On 20th- 21st September 2018, partners from Slovenia, Spain, Bulgaria and Italy had a meeting in Coventry at Coventry University Enterprises Ltd and in Birmingham at West Midlands Chambers of Commerce LLP, where regional stakeholders deepened their understanding of identified good practices they would like to transfer to their respective European regions. After analysing close to 100 Internationalisation support initiatives, 16 stakeholders decided to re-visit our region to learn from our experience and to transfer our local expertise. This learning exercise will allow regions to address gaps within current regional development policy with a view to developing recommendations to inform business support strategy going forward.

Coventry & Warwickshire Growth Hub discussed how the Growth hub is used to help sign post SMEs wishing to Internationalise in the right direction and highlighting the importance of regional agencies working together to help SME internationalisation.

The study visit allowed stakeholders to share and learn partners’ experiences, building and strengthening interregional relationships among partners and other policy makers, whilst allowing European stakeholders to develop their improved regional strategic plan to better support Enterprises to internationalise.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The INTRA project is a 5 years project, co-financed by ERDF under the INTERREG EUROPE Programme.

The objectives of INTRA are to provide comprehensive mapping, evaluation and benchmarking of various internationalisation services available across the regions, highlight good practices/gaps that promote/impede on SMEs at various stages of the internationalization process. Upon the selection of GP the viable strategies/instruments to enhance good practices and address gaps within the regional development programmes will be elaborated and described in the Policy recommendations and implemented in the regional Action plans as to contribute to the internationalization policies aligned to the needs of SMEs and gaps not filled by the existing instruments.

INTRA has 6 partners from six different EU28 member states: Maribor Development Agency (SI), Regional Agency for entrepreneurship and innovations – Varna (BG), Foundation FUNDECYT Scientific and Technological Park of Extremadura (ES), University of Algarve (PT), Coventry University Enterprises Limited (UK), CAPITANK (IT) and is supported by the Managing Authorities for ERDF and represent the active stakeholders in internationalisation.

For more information about the project please contact Soizic Linford at slinford@cad.coventry.ac.uk or visit the website www.interregeurope.eu/intra