clustering and economic cooperation

The project targeted to create 10 new cross-border companies in the gaming industry and contributing to solving common challenges in the CB region’s gaming industry.

The project “Boosting music industry exports to Japan through cross-sectoral collaboration” (FINEEX Music/Finest Sounds) aimed at increasing sales and new export contracts of Finnish and Estonian music industry companies in Japan. The most important achievements:
 
1) New contacts to Japanese music business were established and old ones strengthened, and a lot of silent knowledge from experienced exporters shared. Existing connections with Japanese music industry were updated, and trust built between them and new generation of exporters.
 

SMEs within the Central Baltic countries are in a challenging situation due to a very small size of fiercely competed domestic markets making it necessary to penetrate into new markets. The project has jointly developed a toolbox to support ICT sector SMEs in Sweden, Estonia and Latvia to succeed in exporting into new markets.
 
Joint resources have made it possible to elevate branding, join and jointly use available resources for market studies and promotion as well as establish consortiums capable for further expansion in the new markets.
 

Cities play a significant role in our efforts to reduce the effects of global climate change. Smart cities and innovative urban environments will be the main target of investments in e.g. Africa, Asia and South America within the next ten years. The SME2Go project focused on improving the competitiveness of hundreds of identified smart city solution providers in Estonia, Finland and Sweden.

The project “Access to Distant Markets in Health and Wellness” (CB HealthAccess) has helped a number of SMEs from the CB region, within the health technology sector, to achieve sales, raise investments, and to close different type of collaboration agreements in four distant markets; South Korea, the United States, India and Uganda.
 

The project CB2East - Central Baltic Cleantech Clusters expanding to East of EU markets - generated Latvian and Finnish meta-cluster platforms, where complementary competences have leveraged partner’s capacities to enter new market and support SMEs internationalization strategies. More specifically, Baltic Cleantech Alliance provided functional collaboration aimed to increase export in Central-Asia; whereas in North-West Russia were developed collaboration models with local clusters to support the same targets.

The main achievement of project CLUSME is broad contact network and strong metacluster between enterprises and organisations from participating countries and target markets. Entreprises involved in project activities have started export activities in 3 new markets: Georgia, Uzbekistan and Republic of South Africa.
Thanks to this project preconditions to beneficiaries (SMEs) from mechanical engineering and mechatronics sectors were created. 

Baltic Urban Lab created and tested new integrated planning and partnership models that help turn brownfield areas into smart and sustainable city districts. Brownfields are abandoned or underused areas that have previously been used for example by industry or military.
 
One of the new ways for planning is the public-private-people partnership (4P) approach. 4P improves the inclusion of various public sector actors, private actors, residents, NGOs and of civil-society actors in the planning processes through improved dialogue and common understanding of goals.

For quite sometime, cities have taken steps to include all actors in their urban planning process. Planning according to this principle presents many advantages; those who operate in the area, know their needs best and usually have relevant ideas on how to fulfill them. But what are the best methods to involve them in the process? Live Baltic Campus tested many different ones whilst developing their five integrated urban plans in the university campus areas of Helsinki, Riga, Tartu, Turku, and Uppsala.