The kick-off meeting was the first official get-together of the "ScanBalt CompetenceRegion“ partners after the project application succeeded. The meeting was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a parallel meeting to the kick-off meeting of the ScanBalt “Boosting Baltic FP6” project. This gave the possibility to meet with the partners of this project and exchange experiences.

After visiting the Lithuanian Institute of Biotechnology and Fermentas, a spin-off company of the Institute, the working session started with a short introduction of the project combined with organizational information. Timeschedules were fixed, the workpackages were discussed in detail and the next steps determined. The partners presented information and experiences about their activities in the regions and discussed how to create common structures or to compare data and information.

The project work will start with a collection of available mappings from the regions and the development of concepts on how to build up biovalley-like structures in the new EU-countries (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia). The partners agreed that there is no "recipe“ to manage this. One approach will be to share the experiences of the already existing biovalleys e.g. BioCon Valley, MedCoast, Medicon Valley Academy and Turku Biovalley. The next meeting in Oslo (jan. 25) will focus on these topics.

In the evening it was possible to arrange a smaller joint session with the project "Boosting Baltic FP6“. Mutual synergies for both projects are seen in some of the project-parts, so there will be a close cooperation between the two projects.

Read more about ScanBalt CompetenceRegion here.

Careen Kruger is the new coordinator of the ScanBalt CompetenceRegion project. She is a graduate of the University of Griefswald, with experience in spatial planning and the Baltic Sea region.

News source:Careen Kruger - CompetenceRegion Coordinator ck@bcv.org