Project summary
DigiBEST is an interregional cooperation project for policy improvement of SME’s competitiveness promotion.
The overall objective of the project is to support and promote SMEs competitiveness through digital transformation of SMEs in rural European territories by proposing solutions to enhance their capacity to use advanced technologies and new innovative business approaches for promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth in Europe and its regions.
The project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and Norwegian national funding through the INTERREG EUROPE programme. The project is in the partnership with seven partners from Latvia, Norway, Italy, Spain, Austria and Portugal.
What did this project achieve?
Digital transformation is a part of technological change that requires ongoing process of digitalisation. It has significant implications, particularly for improving business competitiveness and employment.
European businesses can build their strengths on advanced digital technologies and seize the range of opportunities that technologies such as the Internet of Things, Big Data, advanced manufacturing, robotics, 3D printing, blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence offer. Clearly, in a near future the digital transformation will foster economic growth and will become a key driver for employment.
One of the main problems is that many SMEs are not aware of the necessity to adapt to this huge ongoing process of digitatlisation and aren’t aware of existing possibilities. There seems to be a gap between the willingness to use highly digitalised product in private versus professional life. It is therefore crucial to inform SMEs about possible benefits, which digitalisation can bring and about the impact to almost all areas of a company that falling behind this process may bring.
The project’s role is to help European companies, especially SMEs, to acknowledge existing opportunities and possibilities for exploiting them to achieve tangible results, as well as to increase their competitiveness, which will result in improved overall economic development and employment.
A few numbers
1,579,342 €
01 Aug 2019-31 Jul 2023
7 partners