transnational network for SME support in the animal breeding and horticulture sector 
The South Est Europe (SEE) economic area is a SME-based economy in which the sectors of horticulture and animal breeding play a vital role regarding economic growth and employment opportunities. However, SMEs face severe common problems in sustainably keeping up their competitiveness in their national and on the European market. Project partners have decided to tackle the urgent need to improve business support services in order to elaborate an integrated transnational approach that will help to provide a specific support service for SMEs of the horticulture and animal breeding sector. The project?s overall objective is to elaborate the SEE Support Service Protocol that will provide business support organisations with guidelines on how to best assess SMEs in order to enable them to tackle the common challenges that they are facing and on how to best guide SMEs so that these can fully exploit the opportunities that inheres the SEE area for them. The SEE Protocol will also give guidelines on how to best facilitate and promote an innovative entrepreneurship environment for SMEs in the horticulture and animal breeding sector. Based on a mutual learning apporach the partnership will use already detected good practices, prior related project results and newly detected good practices in order to identify the most adequate ones in relation to successful, transferable, innovative and realistic approaches. Based on these findings the partnership will elaborate the SEE Support Service Protocol. Futhermore, the followig support tools will be developped which will make it possible to implement the SEE Support Service Protocol: transnational database for SME support and service providers, innovation awareness raising and diagnostic tools, SEE Kit for entrepreneurs, SEE Virtual Fair, among others. Both the SEE Support Service Protocol and the support tools will be tested by the partnership and interested stakeholders. Their adequateness will be commonly discussed between the partnership and the target groups. Improvements will be integrated in order to then activly transfer the SEE Support Service Protocol and capacitate employees of business support services to implement the Protocol and support tools in their entities. The core results of the project will be an improved effectiveness and quality of business support services that will be able to facilitate an innovative environment for entrepreneurship, assist SMEs to access new markets, improve their product quality and marketing strategies and asess them in the development and implementation of internationalisation strategies. The overall result will be the increased competetiveness of the SMEs active in the horitculture and animal breeding sector.