EDIH Adria and RIMAP platform attached to Vox Novi list

This month's 3PET section focuses on RIMAP, a regional innovation matchmaking platform developed by the University of Rijeka in cooperation with the Regional Development Agency of Primorje-Gorski Kotar the PRIGODA County. It is a platform for knowledge transfer between the academic community and the economy in the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County and beyond, and was developed with the aim of developing the innovation ecosystem in the region. 

The platform enables the networking of economic subjects, entrepreneurs, researchers, scientists, public and non-governmental sectors and other interested participants with the aim of transferring knowledge based on the results of research and development activities. It also encourages multi-directional interaction and proactive networking to connect development projects and the needs of the economic and public sector with research and innovation solutions, achievements, competences and potentials of the scientific sector. RIMAP enables mapping of the needs of the economy and the public sector in the field of development and implementation of advanced digital technologies with the potential to create products and services of higher added value through a multidisciplinary approach combining resources, infrastructure, knowledge, competencies and the availability of human capital in the region, and as an example of good practice will be presented at EU knowledge valorisation week at the end of April in Brussels.

According to Damir Medved, director of EDIH Adria platform will be of key importance for the implementation of the EDIH Adria project. The aim of the project is to finance the development of small and medium-sized enterprises, but also the transfer of knowledge, education on new technologies and especially their networking – and RIMAP will play a key role here. EDIH Adria has ambitious plans and without the use of advanced digital tools, these goals will be difficult to achieve. Finding suitable partners for education and project implementation is often too complex for small organisations – they simply do not have time to do so. 

RIMAP should help them in this by understanding the needs and preferences of each organization that registers on the platform, and I believe that the planned upgrades will go in this direction. 

The future development of the platform within the EDIHA Adria project should certainly go in the direction of further development of the "matchmaking engine", i.e. functionality that will automate the finding of partners and propose associations based on the analysis of not only meta data but also a complete analysis of project proposals and other information present on the platform. Another useful functionality would be to automate the collection of data on open and announced tenders for the funding of projects at EU and Croatian level, which should enable users to navigate more easily in a large number of tenders that often go unnoticed. The regional context and the expansion of the platform should certainly be one of the more important goals of further development – only the presence of a larger number of interested entities ensures that the platform will ensure their quality connection.