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Managing the Industrial Territories in the Knowledge Era (MITKE)
Start date: Oct 31, 2008, End date: Oct 30, 2011 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Business Areas and Industrial Parks (BAIPs) are important policy and planning instrument for local and regional development. Well planned and equipped BAIPs stimulate the relocation of industries and help to relieve congestion and pollution in metropolitan areas. The successful development of a region depends fundamentally on the region's capacity to support and sustain the competitiveness of its local firms by creating a rich milieu of synergies between agencies, firms and the science- technology base. Innovative firms succeed at the micro level by ensuring that they have the capacity to organise resources to match the evolving challenges of their markets. Successfully run and developed BAIPs will continue to play the major role in regional and local economies, but managers must find new ways to support and revitalise BAIPs as spaces that can support innovation, dynamic growth and higher added value in SMEs. MITKE focuses on providing a platform and mechanisms for collection,exchange and transfer of experiences and views among the partner regions in order to find and test better solutions and tools for intervention and thus contribute to an improved management of Business Areas and Industrial Parks (BAIPs) accross Europe. MITKE therefore is in line with the INTERREG IVC programme, which focuses on interregional cooperation, and pursues to improve the effectiveness of regional development policies. Furthermore, the key areas identified by the INTERREG IVC programme, innovation, knowledge economy, the environment and risk prevention, are in line withe the key challenges faced by the BAIPs and the SMEs, and will be addressed by the project. A set of instruments are planned to enable exchange of experiences among regions such as interregional workshops and study visits, practitioners forum on the website, sharing of good practices. Furthermore, the transfer of good practices and the definition of Improvement Plans for specific BAIPs are expected tocontribute to the improvement of regional policies and instruments in order to support BAIPs better face the challenges posed by the global economy. MITKE pays special attention to matching less experienced regions with the ones with more experience as it reflected in the consortium. Europe wide impact is expected through the events, web site and practitioners forum and support from international multiplying organisations such as EURADA is expected in this sense. The agreement of a Joined Action Plan with commitment to its deployment together with the practitioners forum and policy recommendations, are oriented to support the sustainability of the project and capitalisation of its results. The MITKE partnership is composed by 11 partners with several years of experience in managing BAIPs, being 6 of them regional development agencies, 4 Business networks and land developers and 1 research centre. The partnership is representing 10 regions spread over 7 different EU countries. Achievements: MITKE commenced in November 2008 and by 2011 its Partners have developed a pan-European platform for exchanging experience and expertise to improve Business Areas and Industrial Parks (BAIPs). The project taps into the wealth of experience and know-how that 11 partners from 10 regions bring to exchanging good practices and managerial know-how in developing and renewing industrial areas.The LP presented the MITKE project idea in the EU Interregional Cooperation Forum 2007 in Lisbon and MITKE partners have now organised and attended 8 Interregional Workshops (IW) and Steering group meetings since the project began in 2009. These Interregional Workshops took place in Bilbao (Spain), Györ (Hungary), Wakefield (UK), Parma (Italy) and Rzeszow and Lubelskie (Poland), Barcelona (ES) and Dingle (Ireland). And the Final Conference in Bilbao (Spain). Each IW is organized around a concrete topic which affects to the management of BAIPs in order to learn and work in the main output the project, animproved model of managing BAIPs and policy recommendations to support future interventions. MITKE partners participating regions believe that sustainable socio-economic development is linked with the performance of its business areas and industrial parks and that these can and have been strengthened through the projects collaborative linkages. MITKE project has also been very active disseminating project information and through project website (www.mitke.eu). Press releases have been published in the media and newsletters on the occasion of Interregional Workshops and more than 3000 copies distributed. Two brochures have been created and strongly disseminated .MITKE has participated in many other events. Periodically, a Practitioners forum has also been organized where online discussions are around a concrete topic which affects to the management of BAIPs takes place with the participation of experts in the field. One of the main objectives of MITKE is to exchange of experiences dedicated to identification and analysis of good practices among the partner regions.Partner 8: first – the Wakefield District Development Agency - made a Comparative regional analysis, which provided a robust platform on the identification and analysis of Good Practice and published a report of the called "Benchmarking findings". They analysed and identified 41 good practices from the MITKE partners BAIPs covering the following areas: • Planning, designing and re-designing • Environment, Energy and Waste • Engagement with BAIP businesses • Transport • Crime and security of the BAIP • Skills, training and job creation • Supporting Innovation the 41 were short listed to 10 GPs with 6 of these selected as examples and exemplars to transfer and implement amongst MITKE partners.10 GP were awarded a the Final Conference. Over the projects 36 months a body of knowledge, experience as well as confidence has been built up in the model of improving partners BAIPs as a key ingredient for regional progress. Partners have jointly explored new methods for improving and managing BAIPs as a core building block of sustainable regional development through: • Involvement of regional stakeholders in testing the MITKE methodology and other project findings.• Enlargement of the network with other regions interested in testing and implementing the MITKE approach and Good Practices and Good Practice Transfer. Capitalising upon the achievements of the project MITKE has provided an innovative analysis of the Partners BAIP assets with each region engaging key stakeholders to aid decision making for the production of plans to improve and renew the engaged BAIPs and defined improvement plans for specific BAIPs have contributed to the improvement of regional policies and instruments to help BAIPs better face the challenges posed by the global economy. All this work permitted: an agreement on methods and tools to enhance BAIP management.
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  • 77%   1 480 943,13
  • 2007 - 2013 Interreg IVC
  • Project on KEEP Platform
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10 Partners Participants