About project

Cross-border cooperation between Estonia, Finland and Sweden

The challenges facing rural enterprises in all Central Baltic countries include socio-demographic changes, distance to markets, lack of networks, strong product orientation, and the need for novel business models. The rural enterprises must balance innovation with leveraging regional strengths to survive and scale up.

Most of the project area is rural, with food production comprising a significant portion of local businesses. Rural tourism, closely tied to authentic food products, is also prioritized in tourism strategies of all participating countries. In all partner countries there is a need to connect rural areas/production better to urban areas and their customer base.

This project focuses mainly on archipelago and coastal areas, offering natural connections and logistical advantages for cross-border cooperation. Small companies often hesitate to share innovative ideas with competitors from the same region. Cross-border SME groups allow for safe collaboration on new product/process ideas, objective feedback and peer support/guidance.

Cross-border benchmarking and networking facilitate the exchange of innovative ideas, open the minds of participants much wider and increase their acceptance of new ideas and ways of developing their businesses and local solutions, also improving their sustainability.

A cross-border approach also enables to combine expertise from multiple countries to innovate and develop consumer-oriented products, benefiting from neighboring countries’ tourism markets and knowledge on them. Cross-border connections can also lead to potential export opportunities across Central Baltic countries, supporting further the scaling up -process.

Target Group

Focus of the project is on rural small and medium-sized food producing companies and tourism companies connected to food tourism. The project concentrates especially on new ambitious companies who want to grow, has potential for scaling up and has been operating less than 7 years.

Project activities

The project aims to scale up ambitious food and tourism companies seeking the growth in rural areas by iterative innovation and scaling up process. It is based on Linn et al.’s (2010) scaling up framework with 3 phases:

Innovation:

• Raising awareness and inspiring companies through cross-border best practices. Targeted also to a wider audience.
• Cross-border innovation camps to brainstorm and exchange growth ideas using innovation tools including also expert evaluation & feedback for participating companies.
• Selecting scaling up strategy (vertical i.e. improving existing processes or horizontal i.e. expanding networks) and baseline assessment of participating companies.
• Conducting sprints on the best ideas from innocamps for selected the pilot cases and raising up the results of sprints.

Learning:

• Piloting selected innovations with support and expertise for product/process development, including test marketing via e.g. competitions, fairs & online platforms.
• Assisting pilot companies in establishing innovative supply channels (e.g., digital platforms, tourism, short supply chains) through customer data analysis, digital tools & networking.

Scaling Up:

• Revisiting and adjusting business plans with mentorship to facilitate vertical/horizontal scaling.
• Analyzing scaling up results, documenting and disseminating best methods via sector portals e.g. Aitojamakuja.fi and GoRural.ee for future reference and learning
• Building cross-border networks of SMEs through study trips and short-term exchanges by using.

Project partners

The project involves 5 partners from 3 Central Baltic countries and Åland, each contributing complementary knowledge on scaling up rural food and tourism companies. All partners participate all activities although partners have divided responsibility between each other.

The University of Helsinki Ruralia Institute (Ruralia) has 30+ years expertise in developing rural food and tourism companies and runs national food sector co-ordination. In this project Ruralia will act as a lead partner and thus carries the overall responsibility on the project’s coordination, management, reporting and communication. In addition, Ruralia will bring its expertise related to food and rural tourism sectors to the use of the project and especially contributes to implementation of innovation camps and feedback processes in the sprints and pilots. Ruralia is responsible in coordinating the awareness raising -activities and analyzing customer data as well as documenting the best practices/development methods from the scaling up processes.

Entrepreneurial Archipelago (Företagsam Skärgård) will act as a regional partner and coordinate the project’s activities in Åland. Entrepreneurial Archipelago will recruite, support, mentor and provide expertise to the companies selected for the project from Åland. Entrepreneurial Archipelago will also provide networks and expertise from the food artisan cluster in Åland to the project’s use as well as its expertise on event and product development and marketing at cross-border level.

Estonian Rural Tourism Organization (ERTO) will act as national partner in Estonia and coordinates the project’s activities in Estonia. ERTO will find, support, mentor and provide expertise to the companies selected to the project from Estonia. ERTO also acts as a rural tourism expert organisation in the project and will help finding new connections and supply channels between tourism and food companies at cross-border level. In addition, ERTO manages GoRural web portal, which will host project’s documented results after the project’s lifespan.

Södertörn university (SH) will act as a national partner and coordinates the project’s activities in Sweden. Especially they will find, support, mentor and provide expertise to the companies selected to the project from Sweden. SH will also bring their wide knowledge on developing rural SMEs at grass root level, especially in archipelago context and expertise in business economics, accounting and financial management and planning to the use of the whole project at cross-border level.

Turku University of Applied Sciences (Turku UAS) will act as a national partner from Finland and act as a scaling up expert and provide their knowledge and expertise to the project’s use at cross-border level. Turku UAS focuses on finding, supporting, mentoring and providing expertise to the companies selected to the project from Finland.