2nd Project steering committee and management meeting

Elblag, Poland, 24-25 February 2011

Monitoring of IBI Net project progress, discussing on-going and future project activities, was the main topic of partners' meeting.

Project Steering Committee (PSC) representing politicians from project partner regions: Riga (Latvia), Western-Pomerania (Germany), Dalarna (Sweden), Hedmark (Norway), Elblag (Poland) and Minsk (Belarus) approved the 2nd Project Interim Report for the period of 1 June - 30 November 2010 without major objections. For increased project visibility, the proposal was made to develop and distribution of IBI Net Leaflet as soon as possible.

Members of PSC were introduced to the main findings and recommendations of the ‘Analysis of management capacity and development needs of business incubators'. One of the conclusions of the analysis indicates that a number of recommendations relate to establishment of a framework or association for further joint development work among partners beyond the project is necessary. Therefore, it was decided that a partners' task force will be formed for further advancing the idea of the Association of Business Incubators in the Baltic Sea region.

Active work with IBI Net portal is also started and partners discussed the conceptual framework of IBI Net portal. To introduce ICT tools in business incubators that would facilitate evidence/facts based business development, partners agreed to initiate development of such ICT tools that would be helpful for monitoring of development of companies, evaluation of new business ideas and benchmarking for business incubators' services. It was agreed that partners facilitate internal discussions in regions with business incubators to obtain specific business incubators' expectations towards functionalities of ICT tools that would better assist in management processes.