Workshop on local cooperation and development of green innovation solutions organized within the GREENSMES project
Friday, January 23rd, a workshop on local cooperation and development of green innovation solutions was organized within the GREENSMES project.
The workshop brought together key stakeholders from the research and development sector, industry, instructions and support organizations, with the aim to jointly examine why cooperation between research, innovation and the business community often does not yield the expected results in practice – and what can be specifically improved so that green innovations reach the market faster and more successfully.
Jasna Kovčin, from ION Solutions, was facilitator of the Workshop and she presented a big research that was a starting point of the event, which gathered information from Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia regarding SMEs and green transition. There are big differences between those countries in infrastructure, financing, skills and even in support to the SMEs. Nevertheless, SMEs are the backbone of the economy – in Serbia SMEs represent more than 99% and contribute with 57.7% to GDP, mostly in agriculture, the processing industry and the new technology sector. SMEs are the “engines of change” in the green transition, and central actors in the shift towards a sustainable economy.
The workshop exercises were conducted according to new principles, outside the framework of conventional thinking, according to the design thinking model, which is used today in almost all categories of development, whether it is a new product or a completely new technology.
Through a structured creative thinking process, participants exchanged experiences and perspectives from practice, mapped key actors and their roles in the ecosystem, analyzed examples of successful solutions, and jointly formulated proposals for improving the promotion of green innovations and public policy systems that support sustainable business models.
