RIS3 One Stop Liaison Office: supporting the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

Small, medium, and large companies use innovation regarding their business/production processes, products, or services as a way of boosting their performance and competitiveness. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often lacking competencies, know-how and resources and need to rely to a certain extent on external partners to reduce innovation risks and costs.
The RIS3 One Stop Liaison Office (O.S.L.O.) is an initiative to support the Region of Central Macedonia’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem. O.S.L.O. undertakes networking and collaboration initiatives, mapping business needs in the priority areas of the RIS3 Strategy and then organizing targeted actions to address them. In this way, it undertakes to support investment and entrepreneurship and to link research, innovation and new technologies produced in the universities and research centers of the region with the real economy.
SMEs and start-ups can rely on the complementarity of internal and external sources for innovation like Research and Development to be competitive on the global market.
The office acts as an information point and an instrument of mediation, while undertaking the completion of a series of procedures until the final approval and licensing of an investment plan. In this context, a digital platform has been developed that provides the opportunity to SMEs to search for a research partner, funding, or investor.