RUMORE

Huge potentials for growth and job creation remain unused due to missing synergies between the urban, usually more innovative areas, and their surrounding rural parts. The focus of existing cluster and regional innovation strategies on cities often leaves rural and peripheral areas and stakeholders outside of innovation chains. This hinders rural areas and stakeholders from unfolding their full potential, hampers integrated regional development and challenges the implementation of joint innovation policies. RUMORE addresses this challenge by improving regional innovation chains through targeted support of rural-urban partnerships.

The project approach

RUMORE brings together eight partners from five European countries and involves them in an intensive interregional learning process. In the course of the process, the project partners develop and test innovative approaches for the design and set up of policy instruments for integrated urban-rural development in innovation policies. The interregional learning process takes place in the form of local stakeholder workshops and Learning Events designed and organized as living labs. Within these, the regions involved identify and transfer good practices of cluster cooperation, stakeholder involvement and knowledge transfer and share experience on the development of action plans for improvement of their own policy instrument. The exchange of experience results in the development of new methods as well as concrete measures for improved policies in the field of regional innovation strategies. The progress of improvement is continuously supported by the three recurring Working Groups of the project:  

• Working Group "Influencing Regional Innovation Strategies"
• Working Group "Institutionalising Urban-Rural Linkages"
• Working Group "Empowering and Mobilising Innovation Actors"

What is the expected policy change?

Six policy instruments will be improved with an overall influenced amount of ca. 25 Million Euros. The implementation of the improved policy instruments is envisaged to facilitate the better delivery of regional innovation strategies from the urban agglomerations into the rural and peripheral surrounding areas. It will support cooperation activities between innovation actors, will raise the share of innovative companies in the partner regions and will increase the number of enterprises cooperating with research institutes.