The project contributes to fulfilling: Promote sustatinable economic growth
Sub programme: Öresund
Lead Partner: Slagelse kommune
Partners: Sölvesborg kommun
Project Period: 1 feb 2012 - 31 dec 2014
Total Budget: 309 288 EUR
EU Grant: 154 644 EUR
Project Coordinator: Lorentz Jessen
E-mail: lojes@slagelse.dk
Phone: +45 5123 5450
Many municipalities are located in the outskirts of the program area like Slagelse and Sölvesborg and they are characterized by large rural areas with many SME companies. These municipalities are facing the same challenges:
- Negative population growth
- Lack of development in existing companies
- Low attractiveness for new businesses and citizens to establish themselves in the rural areas.
The above is particularily true for Slagelse and Sölvesborg municipalities located in the outer fringe of the program area. This leads to a negative spiral where the existing rural businesses have a low profitability due to a decreasing population which leads to a reduced customer base.
When the small companies in the rural areas have problems with growth and development they often seek assistance from the departments in the municipalities working with business development.
The companies do usually not have the necessary resources in terms of time and knowledge to focus on the development of the company as they are busy trying to survive and hence spend most of their resources running the daily operation.
Project UDLAVI will create the following long-term effects.
- A generic development model for the development of SME´s in rural areas.
- A generic method in a hands-on way of describing step by step how other regions, municipalities and business stakeholders can implement the model with the purpose to stimulate development in their rural businesses.
- In connection with the implementation of the project, a business-to-business network initially consisting of 20 companies from Slagelse and Sölvesborg will be constructed. The longterm effect will be to developed the BtB network consisting of SME´s from all regions and municipalities in the program area.
- Established cross-border municipality cooperation between the first two partners in the project Slagelse and Sölvesborgs business development departments, where there will be a continuous exchange of experiences, generating ideas, developing new projects, but most importantly, a continuing close cooperation in dealing with the development and implementation of the model , method, tool box and the network in relation to the development of our rural businesses.
