Establishement and promotion of new approaches and tools for the strengthening of primary sector's competitiveness and innovation in the South East Europe 

APP4 INNO project sets as starting point the need of creating transnational networks among small and micro-enterprises capable to establish permanent innovation processes and to mobilise critical mass. To this purpose, it intends to set up a transnational competitiveness support system for exploiting the innovation potentials of the agricultural SMEs across the SEE regions, allowing to create the framework conditions for SMEs to access to innovation, technology transfer and cooperation as major keys for their competitiveness in the international markets. It will act by transfering and the spreading approaches, services and tools to improve the competitiveness of the agricultural SMEs, not only in terms of improvement of productive processes at the level of the single SME but also, and above all, in terms of clustering enterprises in order to increase the efficiency of the applied production means. The APP4INNO partnership includes of agriculture business support bodies at regional and local level, proposing a balanced representation of 11 regions among old and new Member States and IPA countries, as well as non-EU country, among which 5 Danube regions, giving to the project a clear relevance for the Danube macro-region. As an added value, besides the business support role of all partners, some of them have a higher R&D vocation, while others have a typical regional agency profile. The link with the policy-making level is ensured by 10%ASPs. The strong result-oriented focus characterising the partnership lead to the conceiving of a result-oriented approach and to the sharing of principles and approaches, developed throughout the project, with the agricultural SMEs and all project stakeholders and target groups. At its first move, the project will define the approaches and methodologies for strengthening the competitiveness of agricultural SMEs as well as the specific sectors (fields of action) and the types of SMEs where the defined approaches can have the most effective results (WP3). This is necessary in order to make available the operative support tools for competitiveness tailored to each involved territory. The defined approaches and related tools will then be set in place by equipping (in terms of human resources and IT instruments) a permanent transnational SMEs support system (WP4) hosted by the partners and able to activate synergies, at national level, with institutions as well as other technology and innovation actors. The transnational service platform will represent a transnational meta-cluster of SMEs that, in the identified fields of action, will able to cooperate, create synergies and aggregate critical mass. The practical application of the defined approaches and services will take place by means of pilot projects (WP5) proposed by the SMEs and becoming those examples of excellence able to start up innovative and competitive processes in a large scale. The pilot projects will be conceived in order to maximize their demonstrative nature. The further capitalisation and integration of the project approaches and tool will be promoted by means of ad-hoc mainstreaming actions which will guide the next steps for addressing sector policies in all involved countries of the SEE area and beyond (WP6). The expected results of APP4INNO are:(1) provide exploration and penetration of new international markets for the local agricultural SMEs, by (a) exploiting the local productive potentials oriented to meeting the new needs of other economic sector of the SEE area and by (b) strengthening the visibility of intangible value of agriculture and its products and (2) increase the competences of the entrepreneurs as well as of the technology and innovation actors and of the local, regional and national governments, by raising their capacity as well as by promoting the establishment of virtuous transnational know-how into productive processes, tools and policies respectively.