Στόχοι του προγράμματος

Excellence-in-Central Macedonia continues and renews the recent efforts to support a development of the Region based on knowledge and innovation, by introducing quite new elements into the regional innovation strategy shaped by RTP and RIS+ initiatives. Main objective of the programme is to make the companies and technology intermediary organisations of the Region familiar with the latest, on a world scale, advances in business, technological, production, and manufacturing practices. To achieve this objective, the programme is setting up four aims:

to increase regional technology intelligence and the understanding of emerging features in innovation and technology
to sustain the development of knowledge-based clusters
to disseminate business excellence and world class manufacturing principles
to help the Region in defining, monitoring, evaluating and restructuring a comprehensive regional development policy, based primarily on innovation and secondly on sustainability.

Overall objective of Excellence-in-CM is to bring the companies of the Region closer to the best practice level. Coming closer to best practice marks a major step in innovation capacity.

Increase of regional technology intelligence is a permanent concern of all leading / motor regions that carry out efforts to capture future technological trends and outline emerging technologies. Technology intelligence in C. Macedonia will be based on three elements:

A regional technology foresight exercise, covering about 10 industries. Although most foresight exercises are national (MITI in Japan, George Washington University in the US, Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, 100 key-technologies in France), there are some quite remarkable regional attempts.
A digital research centre, codifying and presenting the main results of 1000 research projects achieved by regional university and research centres.
Dissemination campaign to 1.000 companies, and selected pilot applications in 15 companies to promote patents, spin-offs, and prototyping.

Sustain the development of knowledge-based clusters is a key element in changing the production structure of the Region. About 10 business clusters will be selected, covering traditional and new industries, which represent the leading regional production potential. At the level of each cluster, the aim is to:

Prepare a development plan outlining the trajectory to be followed in order to improve its position on the knowledge / technology ladder.
Create a digital network among the members of the cluster, facilitating the communication, exchange of experiences, co-operation, and joint ventures.
Identify best practices, business excellence principles, and world manufacturing standards to be introduced into the cluster.

Dissemination of business excellence and world class manufacturing methods is the third pillar of the programme and will be achieved with the implementation of:

10 technology clinics
An innovation award for the adoption of EFQM model
E-learning tools and training courses for 500 companies
E-partenariat events.

Planning a comprehensive regional development policy based on innovation is the concluding objective of the programme and will be achieved through the pilot functioning of a specialized Observatory to which the Region assigns the tasks of evaluating the results and impacts of all innovative actions on the regional economic and social structure and of proposing appropriate policies.