To take up the challenge of economic modernisation, Europe needs to empower its regions and help them create value. This means fostering innovation, digitisation and decarbonisation as well as developing people’s skills. Today, the European Commission is proposing a new set of actions to help Europe’s regions in investing in their niche areas of competitive strength to generate innovation, resilience and growth.

The Commission intends to carry out two pilot projects:

• Tailored support for the specific challenges of regions facing industrial transition: on their request, certain regions can work in partnership with teams of Commission experts to boost their innovation capacity, remove investment barriers, equip citizens with the right skills and prepare for industrial and societal change, on the basis of their smart specialisation strategies and
• Interregional innovation partnerships supported by the EU funds: the aim is to identify and scale up ‘bankable’ interregional projects that can create European value chains in priority sectors such as big data, bioeconomy, resource efficiency, connected mobility or advanced manufacturing.

In addition, the Commission will step up its efforts to help Member States in addressing remaining bottlenecks to growth and establish business-friendly environments.

For more information, visit the European Commission website:

Go to the Commission’s website