General Information: The common challenge of FILA project is to foster agri-food micro and SMEs innovation level. SME innovation is one of the major drivers for common challenge competitiveness, employment, especially young people, introduction of new products to market and access to international markets. FILA labs are open “innovation environments”, which will favour cooperation among actors of the innovation systems (business support organizations, SMEs, research centres, business angels), to improve access to research results for enterprises, thus stimulating the creation of innovative solutions and further investment in innovation, and to support Startups. Three FILA Labs realized in Albania (Korçe), in Montenegro (Niksic - Tehnopolis), in Apulia (Bari - CIHEAM), based on FILA model that are open equipped environments to favour knowledge transfer and collaboration between SMEs and scientific institutions.

General Objective: to enhance SMEs competitiveness and cross-border cooperation strengthening the link between research and enterprises through the creation of cross-border “Fertilization and Innovation Labs in Agri-food”.

Specific Objectives:

• Setting up of a model of Fertilization Innovation Labs in Agri-food. The objective is to define a new model of “innovation environment”, an advanced concept compared with business incubator. It will favour cooperation among innovation chain actors not only in sharing and transferring research results, but also for the co-design of innovative new solutions, motivating young talents
• Implementation of FILA in Apulia, Montenegro, Albania as local systems between Operating Groups – EIP. The model is implemented through the creation of 3 interlinked FILAs established in Bari, Korce e Nikšić (AT2.1). The aim is to create an equipped environment and tools to facilitate the collaboration between research institutions and enterprises in order to enhance their innovation and competitiveness level. For achieving the objective “innovation environment”, it is crucial to develop supporting technological tools.

Realization of a Cross-border network.