The regional framework is the most appropriate environment to promote the RTD among SMEs. It provides a close environment for dialogue, with wide knowledge of weaknesses and region’s specific characteristics and with simplified administrative and regulatory frameworks. It is crucial to be able to develop efficient regional RTD and innovation policies, well integrated within their environment and addressing local weaknesses without losing sight of overall regional social and economical sustainable development. Such policies will efficiently incorporate RTD into the regional entrepreneurial fabric, improving competitiveness and providing more and better employment.
The integration of an RTD-policy benchmarking process within the region’s policy-making process will not only help define future RTD guidelines, but will also provide a mechanism for permanent policy reorientation and focus, therefore providing optimum allocation of public resources.
The integration of the project results and conclusions within the region’s policy-making process will be assured due to the profile of the project partners: regional administrations or organizations with deep connections with these administrations.
The participation in the project of different European regions that have already been involved in previous RIS/RITTS projects will further reinforce the value of the work by incorporating past experiences in regional RTD actions. These experiences and the comparative analysis performed will also enable the identification of particular weaknesses in each of the regions, and will identify possible causes for the failure of some RTD policies.
In order to additionally strength the global European nature of the final objectives, a task is included within BEFORE, which will comprise the creation of a panel of experts in the area of indicators for the measurement of impact of the support policies for Research and Technological Development (RTD) activities. The regions participants in the project will elaborate an indicators panel for the measurement of impact of the support policies for RTD activities. The work developed in the project will analyze that indicators they are more effective to measure the efficiency of the RTD policies in regions with an important rural component.
Finally, in order to further enhance the trans-regional value of the project, the dissemination plan includes dissemination tools that extend well beyond the participant regions in the project. In particular, the development of a virtual platform for the dissemination of project’s information provides the project with a trans-regional and easy-access platform for broadcasting results and for feedback contact point.
This communication platform (BEFORE Web site) will be used as interface for the storage, easy access and dissemination of knowledge, materials, methods and results.
All the technical reports will have free public access anyway.