The kick-off conference was held on 22.10.2020. at Innovation and entrepreneurship Center Tehnopolis represents the beginning of the project “Improving cooperation for the development of cross-border business environment” – 2CODE, in which IEC Tehnopolis is the leading partner.
The 2CODE project will work on strengthening and improving the cooperation of the ICT community in the cross-border program area, improving support activities for the development of new and existing businesses, developing the coworking community, and establishing new innovative infrastructure segments to support innovation.
Activities and expected concrete results within the 2CODE project are divided into four groups and are related to four special focuses of the 2CODE project – IT community, coworking community, innovative laboratories, and support activities to improve the existing and create a new innovative business community.
“The first activities we are especially proud of are the development of the IT community in Montenegro, and a great initiative and the fact that through our 2CODE project will be established a large national IT cluster in Montenegro together with key companies in this sector and the founders of that cluster, but also to decision-makers at the national and international level “, said Aleksandar Janicic, manager for projects and development of entrepreneurship at IEC Tehnopolis. He added that in addition to the establishment of the cluster, it will be networked internationally and then presented to the global market at events such as the Web Summit, and thus will improve the cooperation of IT companies in the cross-border business environment and present it to the international community.
As he explained, the second part of the activity refers to the development of the coworking community and following that we will strengthen the capacities of the existing CODE Hub coworking spaces in Niksic, Mostar, Tuzla and Zadar, through the purchase of additional equipment and furniture, but also educational and promotional activities, such as meet-ups and training courses. Some of the activities will also be the creation of a joint work program of the CODE Hub network of coworking spaces, creating an offer for digital nomads, as well as organizing a regional coworking conference, all in order to improve cooperation between coworking communities in cross-border environments and the coworking community in Montenegro.
“The third segment concerns the establishment of innovative laboratories, so in the coming period about 60,000 EUR will be invested in the innovative laboratory FabLab, which will be an additional segment of TECH lab Tehnopolis, which will provide full non-commercial support to companies, students and young people with innovative business ideas in order to develop those ideas.
The fourth segment refers to the improvement of our capacities and the development of those activities on which we work continuously, and these are various activities to support the improvement of the existing and creation of a new innovative business community in Montenegro and the cross-border program area “, concluded Janicic.
“With this project, we have completed everything we did in the previous period at the regional level, and today we are continuing in a better and stronger direction,” said Ana Bogdanovic from TP INTERA.
“Several years ago, we founded an IT cluster in Mostar of our regional Herzegovinian companies, and through the CODE project, we created a strategy for the development of that cluster in order to create a system that they should follow tomorrow. “Through this project, we will implement this strategy with the help of the right people, the right experts, so that it would be at the level it should be,” she added.
Vedrana Ajanovic from BIT Center Tuzla, one of the project partners, who will try to transfer their 15-year experience to other project partners: “One of the basic things on these projects is knowledge transfer. We are also the oldest institution and we know some things that can happen and that we should perhaps avoid. We are here to share our knowledge, to improve our business infrastructure in Tuzla, but also to ensure that our companies and regional companies start cooperating even more. ”
“Our activity in the project is twofold. We have a part of activities focused on ourselves, so we will try to strengthen our capacities through this project, and on the other hand, of course, to transfer our experiences across borders. Our focus in this project is the creation, equipping and commissioning of a laboratory called UX (UserExperience) lab, which means that it is a laboratory focused on researching users and user needs, thus returning the focus to users “, said Franjo Pehar, a representative of the University of Zadar, also one of the project partners.
2CODE is a continuation of the CODE project (Cooperation for the Development of Cross Border Business Environment) funded under the first call of the cross-border cooperation program Croatia-Bosnia and Herzegovina-Montenegro, for the financial period 2014-2020, which was completed in December 2019.
Project Cooperation for Development of Cross Border Business Environment Enhanced – 2CODE is co-financed by ERDF and IPA II funds of the European Union within the Interreg IPA CBC Programme Croatia – Bosnia and Herzegovina – Montenegro 2014-2020. The leading partner in the project is the Innovation and entrepreneurship center Tehnopolis, while the project partners are: the Foundation for Innovation and Technological Development from Mostar (INTERA TP), the City of Zadar, BIT Center Tuzla, and the University of Zadar.
