Supporting Practices for Entrepreneurship Ecosystems in the Development of Urban Policies
The overall objective of the project is to trigger policy change in the partners' regions improving the implementation of the policy instruments under Structural Funds programmes dedicated to support of entrepreneurship, in particular concerning business incubation. The policy instruments tackled by the project are the ERDF Operational Programmes at regional or national level enabling the creation of new companies through business incubators. Policy change in the partners’ regions will occur through a collective multidimensional and dynamic learning process at policy level and involve, along to the partner organizations, relevant stakeholders of the concerned policy subsystems. Learning will deal with the exchange of experiences on the ways the partners support their business incubators, benchmarking their own experiences against those of their peers and learn from them about what works and what doesn't in different contexts. It will inform policy and practice in the involved regions by developing common ownership of the good practices to be adopted by the partners and ensure that its qualitative outreach inform the Action Plans and influence the nature and scope of the policy change to be achieved. The sub-objective is to contribute to capacity building and policy learning in the partners’ regions by supporting exchange of experience among relevant stakeholders, in order to:
- improve the services provided by the business incubators and ensure their financial sustainability;
- deepen the cooperation between the public authorities, business sector, universities and R&D institutions;
- enable support to specific target groups, such as young people, migrants or female entrepreneurs; 
- develop monitoring systems within the incubators on the performance of their activities and those of hosted companies. 
The partnership brings together city administrations, regional development agencies, chambers of commerce with a balanced mix between more and less developed regions.