Driving Rural Innovation through startup Villages across Europe

In the EU the bio-based economy drives growth through job creation and innovation by utilizing renewable resources and through alignment with the Circular Economy and bioeconomy.

In order to stay competitive, Europe´s industry must become greener, circular and digital through collaboration among companies, Member States, and rural regions in Europe.Within this context, the general objective of DRIVE is to increase the implementation of European local startups, fostering innovative ecosystems for the development of new value-added products, technologies and approaches, via a series of exploitation and trainings actions.

Thus, the three pillars of the project, namely: the identification of the needs and project´s users, for instance, at least 2 regional accelerators and incubators will be contacted by the consortium in each of the three roadshows, according to the methodology, to exchange best practices and reinforce SMEs and start-ups participation, the second pillar, the roadshows and the hackathons, and the last one, the mentoring for the development of the technologies, are closely intertwined, as they have been conceived to cooperate in an integrated way, in order to exploit the benefits gained by the work team, meaning boosting the quality of their work and possible results.

Therefore, the main outcomes of DRIVE can be summarized in four: to develop a tailored business model at an European level for pitching to investors, to apply for regional initiatives or European financial support instruments, to prepare a pitch presentation and identify investor events and to enroll in further acceleration programs for continued idea deployment and commercialization.