Managing the Industrial Territories in the Knowledge Era
Business Areas and Industrial Parks (BAIPs) are important policy and planning instrument for local and regional development. Well planned and equipped BAIPs stimulate the relocation of industries and help to relieve congestion and pollution in metropolitan areas. The successful development of a region depends fundamentally on the region's capacity to support and sustain the competitiveness of its local firms by creating a rich milieu of synergies between agencies, firms and the science- technology base. Innovative firms succeed at the micro level by ensuring that they have the capacity to organise resources to match the evolving challenges of their markets. Successfully run and developed BAIPs will continue to play the major role in regional and local economies, but managers must find new  ways to support and revitalise BAIPs as spaces that can support innovation, dynamic growth and higher added value in SMEs. MITKE focuses on providing a platform and mechanisms for collection,
exchange and transfer of experiences and views among the partner regions in order to find and test better solutions and tools for intervention and thus contribute to an improved management of Business Areas and Industrial Parks (BAIPs) accross Europe.  MITKE therefore is in line with the INTERREG IVC programme, which focuses on interregional cooperation, and pursues to improve the effectiveness of regional development policies. Furthermore, the key areas identified by the INTERREG IVC programme, innovation, knowledge economy, the environment and risk prevention, are in line withe the key challenges faced by the BAIPs and the SMEs, and will be addressed by the project.  A set of instruments are planned to enable exchange of experiences among regions such as interregional workshops and study visits, practitioners forum on the website, sharing of good practices. Furthermore, the transfer of good practices and the definition of Improvement Plans for specific BAIPs are expected to
contribute to the improvement of regional policies and instruments in order to support BAIPs better face the challenges posed by the global economy. MITKE pays special attention to matching less experienced regions with the ones with more experience as it reflected in the consortium. Europe wide impact is expected through the events, web site and practitioners forum and support from international multiplying organisations such as EURADA is expected in this sense. The agreement of a Joined Action Plan with commitment to its deployment together with the practitioners forum and policy recommendations, are oriented to support the sustainability of the project and capitalisation of its results. The MITKE partnership is composed by 11 partners with several years of experience in managing BAIPs, being 6 of them regional development agencies, 4 Business networks and land developers and 1 research centre. The partnership is representing 10 regions spread over 7 different EU countries.