Academic Centre
The event commenced on May 7 with a warm welcome from Zane Zeibote, Director and Project Manager of the Centre of European and Transition Studies of the University of Latvia, and Leena Toivanen, Lead Partner of the Distance LAB project, who officially opened the meeting. The morning session included introductions and a detailed discussion of current issues within the Distance LAB project. Leaders of the service’s pilots presented the progress of each tool. In total, project partners have developed 11 services pilots or tools for SMEs and micro-enterprises to enhance the resilience of the Baltic Sea Region’s enterprises.
The Leader of the Innovation and Communication Tool Group, Heidi Myyryläinen, briefly described the advancement of each piloted tool, highlighting that the pilots are ready to be tested by target group members. The Sustainability and Development Group pilots have already received valuable input and are in the process of collecting feedback from SMEs and micro-enterprises to further refine their services. Similarly, the Remote Business Strategy Group pilots have reached their initial tool designs and starting testing and getting feedback from SMEs to better tailor the services for their needs.
The afternoon session was dedicated for the Steering Group meeting, which included both, present and online participants. Steering group members were introduced with the progress of the project and engaged in discussions. One of the main topics of the meeting was about encouraging target group members to participate in project’s activities, especially testing the created tools and providing feedback for further improvements.
The first day concluded with the 'Train the Trainer' session delivered by the Lithuanian Innovation Centre Internationalization pilot, which introduced partners with the pilot’s materials. Afterwards, partners were divided into several groups and participated in workshops aimed at applying and testing the pilot template.
On the second day, 8 May, the Living Labs Co-Creation Workshop took place with an objective for all 8 project’s Living Labs’ teams to develop concrete ideas for their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or prototypes of Living Labs. The workshop was led by Mr. Charles Bušmanis, a distinguished designer from Latvia with an extensive experience in building innovation ecosystems. His expertise and provided training session were highlights of the workshop, which will help participants to further elevate ideas and achieve innovation.
The Workshop started with a presentation by the project Expert of the University of Latvia, Dāvis Vītols, about the work done so far for the development of project’s Living Labs, what still needs to be achieved, and which experts from various fields are needed for the successful creation of Living Labs. Subsequently, Charles engaged participants in creative activities, such as a role-play, which provided an opportunity to evaluate the Living Labs concepts developed so far from different perspectives. In the second half of the Workshop, partners worked on the creation of a Living Labs prototypes. Partners ended up the Workshop with much clearer idea, vision and overall concept for their living labs, which will be further developed through one-on-one consultation sessions with Charles.
More information:
Zane Zeibote, UL project manager, e-mail: zane.zeibote@lu.lv, tel. (+371) 29417214
Dāvis Vītols, UL project expert, e-mail: davis.vitols@lu.lv, tel. (+371) 26652750
Project website: https://interreg-baltic.eu/project/distancelab/
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/distancelab
LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/distancelab/
