Rural-Urban Partnerships Motivating Regional Economies
The overall objective of RUMORE is to improve policies in the field of regional innovation strategies by facilitating rural-urban cooperation and partnerships. Huge potentials for growth and job creation remain unused, because urban – often more innovative – cores and surrounding rural parts are not well linked in terms of innovation chains, hence exhibiting a gap for joint innovation policy and effects for regional development.  Clusters and regional innovation strategies are often too focused on cities, thus ignoring the stakeholders (e.g. R+D institutions, innovative enterprises) in the rural and peripheral areas who then cannot unfold their full spectrum and chances. RUMORE tackles this shortcoming in many policies and enhances the delivery of innovation in regional innovation chains via improved rural­urban partnerships.
The partnership consists of 8 partners from 5 countries with a mix of regional authorities, one advisory Lead Partner and a business development agency.
RUMORE compiles the few approaches of how to design and set­up policy instruments for integrated urban­rural development in innovation policies. Good practices from the partners will be shared in an interregional learning and peer review process through Learning Events designed as living labs, and subsequently transferred and adapted to the specific contexts. The progress of improvement of each policy instrument is continuously discussed and 3 recurring working groups on overarching level produce results and added value.
4 ERDF-ROPs and 2 other policy instruments will be improved with an overall influenced amount of ca. 7,5 million Euros. The expected and envisaged results include more than 300 activities supported between innovation actors as well as a significantly raised share of innovative companies in the partner regions. In order to capture the interregional learning and capitalise on it for other European stakeholders, recommendations are derived and spread by the LP in existing networks