An Interreg North Sea Region (NSR) co-funded project which aims to enhance regional innovation support capacity to increase long-term innovation levels and support smart specialisation strategies. To achieve this, RIGHT concentrates its efforts on developing the skills of the workforce relevant for SMEs in the participating regions within the energy and blue sectors.
As the first order of business in the RIGHT project, each region produced and published its own regional report, using an underlying format developed in work package 3 in this project (Manickam & van Lieshout, 2018). The format and the regional work consisted of three parts. Part 1 is the Regional Innovation Ecosystems (RIE) mapping to provide a qualitative understanding of the region’s innovation ecosystem with regards to its Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3). This part is divided into a socio-economic and R&D profile mapping and a SWOT analysis. The RIE is an adaptation of a methodology and tool used by the eDIGIREGION Project. This part is to be filled in by desk research and consulting regional experts (through interviews and/or focus groups). This part is used for mapping the own regional ecosystems, information for the partners to get to know the other regions and to be able to identify relevant similarities and differences across the regions, which in turn, will be reported in part 1 of this trans-regional report. Regions themselves chose their own sector focus. One could focus on either energy of the blue sector, or both. Part 2 focuses on the innovation capacity and needs of SMEs from the chosen sector(s). The questions are adapted from a systemic study on cluster developments, in which an analysis model was developed (Manickam, 2018). It is based on (on average) six face-to-face interviews with SMEs from the sector. The outputs of these interviews were summarised into one template, in English, by each partner region to allow for joint analysis and comparison that is in turn reported in part 2 of this report Part 3 introduced the Job Forecasting and Skills Gaps mapping using the JOES templates as developed by van Lieshout et al. (2017). To gain an appreciation of the extent and nature of skills gap, each region was asked to analyse current and potential future labour demand, workforce, and discrepancies between the two, in up to 2 businesses. For obvious reasons (confidentiality and privacy), the JOEs will not be published separately, nor will their information be used in the report in a way that would be traceable to specific businesses. We will use exemplary information from them for illustrative purposes in Parts 1 and 2 of this report where relevant.
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This report consists of two parts and describes the highlights of the investigations carried out in the Province of Groningen as part of the Right Project to understand the Regional Innovation Ecosystem in the region. The first part is focusses on the socio-economic and R&D profile (Part 1A) and a SWOT analysis on salient aspects related to Regional Innovation Ecosystems (Part 1B). The second part (Part 2) focuses on the SME innovation capacity and needs, and presents the highlights of 6 interviews with SMEs in the region. The RIGHT project, an Interreg North Sea Program, will contribute to territorial growth in the North Sea Region by connecting smart specialisation strategies to human capital and the skills of the workforce by defining existing and potential regional growth sectors and sub-sectors.
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Finished
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