Interregional cooperation for competitive and sustainable regional food industries
I4Food project has gown out from the changes have taken place within European food producing industry. The fundamentally different playing field this sector is facing now is characterised with increased international trade in food and beverages, significant changes to traditional markets and consumer expectations. Whilst on one hand it is needed to participate in the European and in the world market, on the other there are constraints to contribute to European and regional social-economic-territorial cohesion and also to stimulating and making European food industry itself more innovative, competitive and sustainable. When assessing these challenges, several issues are to be considered: food industry means employment opportunities in regions where high value added sectors are not present, could be a source of innovation and economic cooperation for regional SMEs. By exploiting safe, healthy and regional food products SMEs may target new market areas, attract investments and skilled
workforce into their regions, simultaneously preserving their environmental values. I4Food regions are all affected by these challenges. To respond properly, they have their own development strategies to adjust/develop accordingly.
Project partnership covers wide European area (N-E-S-W) of 6 regional authorities/bodies of 6 EU member states, with comparable strategies/good practices in common food industry sub-sectors. The Lead Partner comes from an East-European (HU) convergence region.
The project addresses INTERREG IVC Programme priority innovation and knowledge economy, and is dedicated to entrepreneurship and SMEs. Partners set as their overall objective to improve their development policies for competitive and sustainable regional food industries and SMEs based on European wide experience exchange. Sub-objectives and activities target 6 policy areas: employment-jobs, innovation-knowledge, regional business cooperation, acces to finance and markets, safe-healthy food products and
environmentally conscious SMEs. By focusing on key regional strategies, key SMEs and actors, key actions and key good practices of their food industries, they develop a common understanding of food industry challenges based on regional analyses and by joint learning in the form of manual and study visits. To exploit findings, partners improve their regional strategies with implementaion plans and good practice transfers to strengthen innovation capacity of food industry SMEs, influence the EU-wide policy context of food industry with recommendation on the six policy areas mentioned. Effective communication serves the involvement of policy and decision makers at regional, interregional and EU level. By this the horizontal and vertical networking capacity of I4Food partner regions also develops.
I4Food results are more effective regional development policies targeting the increase of competitiveness and sutainability of the food industry SMEs at regional and EU level in 6 policy areas.