Call: Towards EU Regional Economic Convergence (TREC) - Pilot Projects to reinforce collaboration among clusters and technology centres

COSME is the EU programme for the Competitiveness of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).
COSME supports SMEs in the following areas:

• Accessing finance
• Opening markets
• Supporting entrepreneurs
• Improving business conditions

The main objective of this call is to launch pilot projects reinforcing cooperation among clusters and related technology centres. These pilot projects should be in line with regional smart specialisation priorities, exploit growth opportunities and accelerate regional economic convergence across the EU.

This call aims to maximise the innovation uptake and productivity increases by identifying:

• R&D and innovation solutions and challenges;
• value-chain linkages;
• business opportunities for collaboration across borders and sectors, notably between SMEs from less and more economically advanced regions.

The proposed pilot projects shall specifically contribute to:

• the undertaking of a benchmarking exercise of the growth potential of the participating regional clusters and the identifation of bottlenecks and opportunities for collaboration;
• the exploration of concrete collaboration opportunities between clusters, technology centres and their SMEs with the goal of improving industrial competences, exploiting available innovation and R&D results, and adding value to existing industrial sectors and value chains;
• developing a cluster partnership strategy for joint activities and related regional smart specialisation investment plans for organisational, skills and industrial development improvements to foster sustained growth across the participating regions.