The aim of MIRIAD (Contract number: KNOW-REG-2-CT-2005-029490) is to stimulate policy intervention focused on raising levels of R&D investment in four regions across Europe:
- Yorkshire and the Humber in the UK
- The western Turkish region of Thrace from Istanbul (inclusive) to the Greek and Bulgarian borders of Turkey
- Central Macedonia, East Macedonia and Thrace in Greece (including Thessaloniki)
- The south eastern Bulgarian region from Sofia (inclusive) to the border with Greece and Turkey, including the Bulgarian Black Sea region
The key objectives of the project are:
- To formalise policies with regional and national government aimed at improving levels of R&D investment by businesses, government and higher education.
- To establish tools by which SMEs are able to identify and measure their knowledge assets through developing a range of benchmarking and scorecard instruments tailored to the regions in which they are operationalised.
- To establish a regional mutual learning platform for promoting the trans-national exchange of practices for enhancing regional R&D investment.
- Facilitate the transfer of good practices in terms of participation to EU funded research, links and co-operation between SMEs and research performers, methodologies and models for the creation and development of research oriented businesses.
- Establish and launch a R&D Investment Strategy for each of the regions, that is complementary to the existing policy initiatives and activities already being undertaken, but also has a real and positive impact on future R&D investment performance. The processes underlying the development of these strategies can then be applied in other regions across Europe.
The project outcomes can be summarised in the following:
- Benchmarking Regional Knowledge Demand and Absorption in the 4 regions
- Benchmarking Regional Knowledge Supply and Transfer in the 4 regions
- A Trans-National Regional Learning Platform
- Regional R&D Investment Strategies for the 4 participating regions
