SME and entrepreneurship

For contributing to more entrepreneurial central Baltic youth, the Junior Achievement (JA) organisations from Estonia, Latvia, Sweden and Finland joined forces to create joint student companies (business simulations) across borders. The project activities took place during 3 school years, totaling  78 joint student companies with 480 participants from 55 schools.

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.
 

The overall aim for the project “Start-up Passion in Baltic Sea Region” (STARPABS) was to raise interest towards entrepreneurship among university students, and help them to build internationally competitive teams. Three universities from the countries Finland, Estonia and Latvia participated.
 
The main objective was to create student-based knowledge intensive cross-border companies and cooperation agreements.

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.
 

As a main result two new joint companies were created and two other companies are cooperating. The project counted approximately 100 startups which benefited from project activities such as business missions, training courses, networking events, mentoring etc. Cooperation between SHIFT and sTARTUp Day business festivals was initiated by the project. Project was led by two partners: Tartu Science Park in Estonia and Turku Science Park in Finland.
 

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 project Archipelago - strategic partnerships for business development inspired entrepreneurs in the archipelago and rural areas to develop through partnerships and training in Finland (including Aland Islands) and Sweden. The archipelago regions have certain challenges: small scale communities, depopulation, aging generation, strong seasonality, lower accessibility, etc.

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.