The South Transdanubian Regional Innovation Agency has prepared the South Transdanubian Regional Action Plan within the framework of the RISE project. The document explores how the business, expert and partnership experiences gained during the project can be used in future business development services.
One of the central objectives of the RISE project is to provide practical support to food-sector and related small and medium-sized enterprises in their digital, energy-efficiency and circular transition. The assessment and mentoring tools applied in the project are not stand-alone instruments. Based on the project experiences, they point towards a regional development logic that starts from the real operational challenges of companies and seeks to provide feasible, step-by-step responses.
The aim of the South Transdanubian action plan is to translate the transnational RISE mentoring approach into local action. This means placing the project methodology, company assessments, mentoring experiences and the B2GreenHub knowledge-sharing platform into a practical framework that fits the situation and development opportunities of food-sector SMEs in South Transdanubia.
South Transdanubia is a particularly relevant setting for this approach. The region has a strong rural dimension, local production and processing traditions, and a food-sector background built on many small and medium-sized enterprises. Wine production, bakery, meat and dairy processing, fruit and vegetable processing, and various forms of local food production all play an important role in the region. At the same time, these enterprises are increasingly facing the challenges of digitalisation, energy efficiency, sustainability and competitiveness.
RISE project experiences show that most enterprises are open to development, but progress is often slowed down by practical barriers. These may include limited in-house expertise, labour shortages, difficulties in integrating new technologies, high investment costs, financing and pre-financing problems, and uncertainty about which development step should come first.
One of the key messages of the Regional Action Plan is that companies primarily need support that is linked to their everyday operations, rather than general or abstract advice. Digital, energy-efficiency and circular improvements should not be treated as separate topics, but as interconnected operational issues. Inventory management, production, logistics, energy use, packaging or customer relations often involve technological, organisational and sustainability-related aspects at the same time.
The action plan identifies four main lines of action. The first is practical mentoring and transition support, helping companies turn assessment results into concrete and feasible development steps. The second is strengthening the connection between mentors, experts, solution providers and companies. The third is the involvement of regional stakeholders and the regional anchoring of the action plan. The fourth is preparing the ground for the results of the RISE project to remain useful in the region’s business development practice after the project ends.
Mentoring and matchmaking play a particularly important role in this logic. Matchmaking means connecting business needs with the right expert, technological or business-development support. According to the RISE experiences, the main problem is often not the complete absence of relevant knowledge or service providers. Rather, companies find it difficult to reach the actors who can provide relevant, reliable and practical support. For this reason, the Regional Action Plan also emphasises the intermediary and coordination role: companies need more visible, more accessible and better structured support pathways.
The B2GreenHub platform appears in this process as a supporting tool. As the knowledge-sharing and networking platform of the RISE project, it can help organise information, good practices, expert contacts and development opportunities. At the same time, the South Transdanubian action plan also stresses that a digital platform alone is not sufficient. It can create real value only if it is embedded in regional mentoring, expert-support and business-development processes.
The Regional Action Plan is not a new grant scheme or a separate financing programme. It is rather a professional framework that helps connect business needs, assessment experiences, expert knowledge and future development opportunities. This approach is especially important for smaller companies, which often do not have dedicated development, energy, digitalisation or sustainability specialists, but still have to make an increasing number of decisions in these areas.
Based on the South Transdanubian experiences of the RISE project, gradual development may be one of the keys to future business development services. For many companies, it can already be a major step forward to better understand their own operations, identify the most important development points, assign internal responsibilities, connect with relevant experts, and define actions that can be started in the short term. Larger investments, more complex developments or new cooperation projects can then build on these first steps.
The action plan also relies on cooperation between regional actors. In addition to companies, business support organisations, experts, knowledge institutions, clusters, municipal and territorial development actors also have an important role. The aim is for the mentoring logic tested in the RISE project not to remain a one-off project activity, but to contribute to a better organised, more practical regional support environment that is closer to the actual needs of companies.
For the South Transdanubian Regional Innovation Agency, one of the most important lessons of the RISE project is that supporting digital and green transition can be effective only if it is not approached as a purely technological issue. Understanding companies’ internal capacities, decision-making situations, financing options and expert connections is equally important. The Regional Action Plan seeks to carry this approach forward in the business development practice of South Transdanubia.
The RISE project is co-funded by the European Union within the framework of the Interreg Danube Region Programme.
