Boosting Innovation in Europe

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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

Audit Authority – Call for service support and technical assistance

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The ADRION Audit Authority seeks service support and technical assistance in carrying out its functions.

The service covers the audit activity related mainly to system audits, audits of operations and audits of the accounts. It is also required to provide support in drawing up annual control reports and management of meetings of the Group of Auditors, composed of representatives of eight Partner States.

Deadline for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 18/09/2017; h: 12:00 (CET).

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Win a prize by spreading knowledge about Europe

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To bring closer the EU to the citizens, the European Commission launched new EU-wide contest for a prestigious “Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outreach: Spreading Knowledge about Europe”.

The Prize will reward outstanding contributions that communicate the founding values, history, action and key benefits of the EU to citizens; enhance citizens’ understanding of the EU; broaden ownership of the European project and build trust in the EU’s promise of a better future for all.

The prize is open to individuals or groups of individuals (natural persons). The individual applicant or the group leader, in case of groups of individuals applying, must have at least a Master’s Degree and must, at the time of the application, be affiliated with a legal entity such as, for example, an academic institution, organisation, civil society organisation, company or other type of legal entity established and based in an EU Member State.

Prizes:

  • Six first prizes of 50,000 EUR;
  • Six second prizes of 30,000 EUR and
  • Ten third prizes of 17,000 EUR.

Deadlines:

  • Registration of intention to apply is compulsory by 16 August 2017.
  • The deadline for full applications will be 02 October 2017.  Only those registered by 16/08 will be invited to submit a full application.
  • Applications will be assessed in October 2017.
  • The Award Ceremony will be held in the first trimester of 2018.

The application documents and the Rules of Contest are available on the call page.

Go to: the Cal Page.