European Technologies for Sustainability - Project ET4S

Five European clusters,  from five different countries, started the ET4S project which aims to support the internationalization process of European SMEs to third target markets.

15th of October 2020. European Technology for Sustainabillity - eT4S - support the development of collaboration and business agreements between the EU and North America (North East Coast of the USA- and between the EU and Asia/Asean (Singapore and China ic. Shanghai). ET4S focuses on technology enabled solutions addressing sustainability challenges in urban areas (water, air, energy, waste etc.) and is managed by a consortium which is embedded within the SmartCityTech partnership and can leverage on the expertise and network build by this partnership since 2013. The five clusters involved in this action area GAIA (Basque Country, Spain), DSPValley (Flanders, Belgium), Aalborg Komune (Aalborg, Denmark), Sofia Knowledge City (Sofia, Bulgaria) and Digital Knowledge Observatory Foundation (Warsaw, Poland).

The project will organize a series of activities with the objective of increasing the networking and business activities within European and external country stakeholders. On that purpose, the project will organize several workshops, networking and matchmaking activities and business missions addressing those third markets. 


ET4S follows the next goals:

  •       To develop viable cooperation and business agreements in the eT4S domain. eT4S will explore concrete opportunities in the target regions hereby leveraging on the existing beachhead network which was already developed through the Smart City Tech partnership. This has to lead to at least 2 collaboration agreements and 4 business agreements.

  •    To increase the likelihood of impactful internationalization by developing a online assessment strategy and grant access to support by internationalization experts either in the Eu and in the target countries. At least 12 cluster organizations will follow this assessment strategy and 75 companies will benefit from the the support of the experts.

  •       To organise events in EU to prepare the companies for internationalization, will organize webinars to get acquainted with the target market, will organize matchmaking missions toward the target markets and will provide follow up toward the business agreements. In total eT4S will support more than 160 individual matchmakings, will support/organize at least 16 events, make at least 75 companies benefit and strives for a 5% increase in turnover and employment reported by the companies involved.


  •      To support all the activities with the a sound communication strategy, involving the eT4S partners' network, the SmartCityTech ecosystem, the European Cluster Ecosystem (ECCP) and the ecosystem of the beachhead partners.

 

In case you may have some interests, you can put in contact with: Jon Mitxelena (mitxelena@gaia.es)




     This project has received funding from the European Unión COSME COS-Cluster Programme, under the grant agreement Nº 951206