On 11 December 2014 the Danube-INCO.NET’s General Assembly took place in Vienna. Project partners discussed about the progresses and achievements of first year as well as on the future plans. In general, the project is performing well while already creating impact on the region and making its work known to the public.

Danube-INCO.NET’s General Assembly was part of a wider series of meetings taking place in Vienna last week. The project held indeed also joint workshops with the Priority Area 07 Steering Group members and EUREKA NCP/HLC.

The General Assemly served to take stock of the situation, conduct creative dialogue and identify common problems. The event tangled issues ranging from project financing, policy making concerning research and innovation in the Danube region, cooperation among renewable energy players, creating R&I funding mechanisms and communicating about project’s activities and offered opportunities.

Overall the project activities are continuing successfully. The available budget reaches 70% while the partners proved to be really active during the year 2014 having conducted workshops, webinars and high level meetings addressing both EU and non-EU states.

The project’s cooperation with the European Commission (JRC etc.) has also been highlighted. According to EC’s Policy Officer Tania Friederichs who honored the meeting with her presence, Danube.INCO-NET’s activities are complementary to EU Commission’s work, making important progress concerning the integration of the ERA. In this regard, she also urged the partners to make their work further known to European institutions. Reaching out to politicians is and will continue to be an important goal of Danube-INCO.NET, apart from S&T cooperation.

The project has collected an important database of stakeholders active in the fields of policy making, RTDI (including the energy efficiency and bioeconomy sectors) and industry in the Danube Region and beyond. The identified stakeholders, coming from both the private and public sector, will have the opportunity to interact with each other and search for synergies during the upcoming year, thus creating interconnections and knowledge transfer flaws, preconditions to achieve social cohesion in Europe.

The creation of a funding mechanism, namely the DRRIF, especially for the Danube region was also discussed. A feasibility study is being conducted in this regard, which results are going to be announced in spring next year. Additionally in respect to the widening of funding possibilities in the region, three cluster workshops are going to be held during the second year of the project aiming at creating a pilot call and other pilot activities which are going to be implemented during the third year of the project.

Finally the project is making important progress in making its work known to the public. The Danube-INCO.NET portal is being visited by around 4000 unique visitors per month, the project newsletter can boast more around 12.000 recipients and communication is carried out also through social media such as Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter.

All interested parties are invited to follow the project news and updates by exploiting all available channels. Stay tuned as relevant project deliverables as well as many interesting events, calls and workshops are going to be published!