About Northern Connections
Northern Connections is a partnership of 21 clusters, cities regions and knowledge institutions, and we work together to create innovation connections between our enterprises and clusters in the energy sector.
We aim to increase the innovation potential across borders. We look into how we involve enterprises from different countries in our Living Labs and we develop tools for our clusters so they can provide the right support for the enterprises.
The joint challenge is to test the use of domestic innovation support measures transnationally and address barriers to competition which exist between clusters and regions. Innovation support is mainly applied within narrow geographies where calls to action are not visible transnationally and cities & clusters lack capacity to involve SMEs broadly.
Our objective is to get more enterprises to participate in transnational innovation collaboration via strengthening transnational cluster and city/region cooperation.
Main output is building capacity and transnational relations of sustainable energy clusters to provide demand-led innovation support. This creates the foundation for involving more SMEs in innovation. Develop broader political backing using northern connections to create coherence between political ambitions and cluster potential for innovation support.
Our approach is to provide a bridge between private and public sector on transnational innovation support. This will be achieved through improving/aligning innovation support measures by creating incentives for transnational SME innovation partnerships to collaborate and establish a critical mass of innovation activity on a transnational basis. We will pilot joint transnational innovation support measures aimed at broadening opportunities for SMEs from different NSRs to participate in regional innovation activities, which ultimately will strengthen their ability to take part in global markets and create new value-chains.
More info: Northern Connections homepage
