Last week partners of two new projects within the Danube Transnational Programme: “Excellence-in-ReSTI” and “ResInfra@DR” met in Vienna to launch their activities. The kick off events were the first opportunity for a physical meeting of all international project partners. In this context, both consortia jointly agreed on the management of the projects and underlined the importance of the tasks ahead against the background of each project’s mission.
Excellence-in-ReSTI (Excellence in research, social and technological innovation project management) and ResInfra@DR (Facilitating macro-regional scope and link up to socio-economic actors of Research Infrastructure in the Danube Region) are funded under the EU’s Interreg Danube Transnational Programme (DTP) and are both coordinated by ZSI – Centre for Social Innovation.
The activities of Excellence-in-ReSTI are tailored to young project managers working in the field of research & innovation (R&I) in the Danube Region. By developing innovative online courses on good practices in acquisition and management of R&I projects in combination with a support helpdesk to answer questions, the target group trained will improve its skills both in the initiation and implementation of EU funded projects.
Whereas Excellence-in-ReSTI focuses on individuals, ResInfra@DR is aiming at the institutional level. The framework conditions for the operation of existing research infrastructures in the Danube Region must be improved in order to stimulate the innovation management cycle in the region. Moreover, private actors should be engaged in increased co-funding for the future build-up of research infrastructure in the region, i.e. through private public partnerships. These objectives are tackled through a set of concrete actions, namely the initiation of a dialogue between the key stakeholders, the delivery of trainings, the collection of specific data for analytical work, the development of two pilot activities and the organisation of peer reviews of the regional research infrastructure to assess and improve their performance.
The kick off meetings were organised last week back to back with the Danube-INCO.NET synergy conference for various projects funded under the Danube Transnational programme. 14 different funded DTP projects were gathering at Tech Gate for networking and seeking alliances in future activities where appropriate. To create synergies also with other partners beyond the own project consortium is also a rationale of the DTP funding authorities (labelled as “capitalisation strategy”).
