Five years of the European Entrepreneurial Region experience: Learning from past entrepreneurial successes for better results
The fifth anniversary of the European Entrepreneurial Region (EER) award was celebrated with a conference yesterday, which acknowledged the ongoing progress made by previous winners with a view to strengthen the entrepreneurial spirit across the EU. The event came ahead of the announcement of the 2016 winners scheduled for two weeks' time.
The EER award is a CoR initiative launched in 2009, and is given to EU territories that demonstrate outstanding, future-oriented entrepreneurial strategies: not implementation. The awards are therefore given pre-emptively for the year ahead, over which time the EER team works closely with the projects to help promote their successful roll-out.
The day-long conference offered a platform to highlight the successes of the 12 regional initiatives that have won the award in previous years, in anticipation of the EER 2016 award winners' announcement during Committee of the Regions (CoR) July plenary, on Thursday 9. Reference was made to two of the first winners of the award for 2011, whose initiatives have been taken up beyond their own regions of: Kerry County in Ireland and the Murcia Regions in Spain. As well, representatives from last year's winning regions: Valencia, Spain; Northern Ireland, UK; and Lisbon, Portugal, sat on panels to directly share their experiences of the projects and the EER.
In his opening speech, CoR president Markku Markkula, who attended the event, said: "The EER award is oriented towards the future. We set regions and cities the challenge to commit themselves to an ambitious, forward-looking political vision, and to implement a series of concrete actions in order to bring this strategy into reality during their EER year and beyond."
"Today's conference also shows that the EER regions constitute an exceptional pool of expertise for regional and local policies aimed at helping SMEs and entrepreneurs to thrive. Therefore we shouldn't limit our discussions to just one meeting per year at the occasion of the Open Days. I propose to transform today's conference into a recurrent event and, from now on, to come together in Brussels during the first half of each year for an annual meeting of EER regions. This will allow us to intensify our exchange of ideas and to push forward towards our common goal of boosting entrepreneurship and SMEs across the EU."
Elżbieta Bieńkowska i, Commissioner for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs highlighted in her message that "growth and jobs is a priority of the Commission" and added that "The Commission and the Committee of the Regions are working towards a common goal" of creating an entrepreneurial culture. She said: "The 15 EER regions are showing just what regions can do to support their SMEs and entrepreneurs."
The announcement of the 2016 winners will be followed by a press conference in the early afternoon.