The online event joined representatives from S3 Platforms of Agrifood, Industrial Modernisation and Energy to boost interregional innovation and investment through value chains. Also there were bilateral thematic sessions to know about the progress and plans for the future of each S3 partnership, as well as to generate bilateral discussions between the EC services and the S3 partnerships.

Along thes first days of July, 1, 2, 5 and 6, the European Commission have organised a series of webinars and meetings for the Smart Specialisation Strategies Platforms (S3 P). Several Directorates General have participated in the different sessions with the double objective of both delivering information about their programmes for the new programming period and their links to the S3 P and getting feedback from the thematic partnerships.

During bilateral sessions, each partnership of all three platforms have been presented and asked to share about their bottlenecks encountered all along the development of the pilots and businesscases, if they had. In the case of Traceability and Big Data, our co-lead region and Naturcode have talked about COMPLAT and the difficulties to develop such interregional projects.

One of the main issues from the sessions is the high potential of mutual learning from different initiatives that it are being undertaken in different fields in the new programming period. Nevertheless, the absence of specific funds devoted to partnerships in this new period has been clearly specified. Coordination of and participation in the partnerships must be assumed by each region which are strongly encourage to participate in the definition of their S4 strategies to include suitable actions to strengthen this collaboration. Also, to be able to develop pilots or business cases in the future.

A novelty fromt he Commission this time has been the participation of DG Mare as they are exploring the possibility to launch a new partnerhip on blue economy.

All sesions have been recorded, so we will keep you updated if they happen to be published.

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