Ingenius Net Project

WHAT IS INGENIUS NET?

A national level network of stakeholders that was developed in 2019 and in which there are representatives of the 4 important social environments of a society: the academic, business, institutional and civil society environments.

This network is linked to the digital platform Ingenius NET, which represents an instrument and a framework that allows its members to keep in touch and up to date more easily and also to support each other for various initiatives and to strengthen the local entrepreneurial environment in order to switch to an economy of knowledge, intelligent specialization and to increase the cohesion through localization.

The members of the platform don’t pay any memberships and all the main instruments that are to be developed are free also, but in time they may contribute to different common projects and add their own resources, either material, know-how or network in order to contribute to the platform and network development, but mainly to achieve long term objectives.

BENEFITS:

• Ease of access to important stakeholders from different industries/categories/regions;
• Easing the involvement in local initiatives or easing the development of impactful initiatives;
• Access to information and a better understanding of documents on strategic position;
• Active participation to dialogue, strengthening the administrative capacity of own organizations;
• A better understanding of the local entrepreneurial environment and a more active connectivity to it;
• Ease of access for other stakeholders through the electronic platform;
• Access to information on financing with irredeemable European funds;
• Advertising and support to own initiatives;
• Quality networking;
• Influence and impact inside the community;
• The possibility to become a co-founder of Ingenius Hub locally;
• The possibility to participate in consortia created for European funds attraction, through state programs or directly from the Commission;
• The possibility to promote together bigger strategic projects with authorities’ participation to the dialogue table;

The network was built on the following pillars:

Pillar I – Promoting entrepreneurship as an alternative to the labor market – support policies for small entrepreneurs in big companies, to raise the standard of living and the dimension + quality of local market

Pillar II – Promoting innovative entrepreneurship, focused on significant added value and destined to a global market

Pillar III – Promoting and supporting research and innovation and mechanisms’ development required for technological transfer in the entrepreneurial environment

Pillar IV – Promoting business partnerships: new partnership forms, public-private partnerships

Pillar V – Foreign investments attraction by creating durable and impactful project in order to evolve to smart cities

Pillar VI – Easing adaption of local educational offers to the real market needs

Pillar VII – Identifying new external markets for local businesses, creating synergies between Romanian cities and foreign cities based on strategical criteria on the economic side

Pillar VIII – Identifying and developing transnational projects of strategic importance

Pillar IX – Increasing the absorption rate of European funds on local plans and rising impact

Pillar X –Accessing funds from all the existing plans of integrated measures, starting with regional and local strategies, as well as strategies defined by the most important local stakeholders

DOWNLOAD THE MEMORANDUM

DOWNLOAD THESIS RESULTS

“Construim impreuna #ViataDupaCovid19” (We build together #LifeAfterCovid19) campaign

Inside this network there was organized one of the most consistent campaigns during the pandemic, “Construim impreuna #ViataDupaCovid19”, following which over 800 organizations have participated to the survey created by Ingenius Hub, through which a set of measures and support was created in order to help entrepreneurs and over 200 entrepreneurs, state secretaries, ministries, representatives of entrepreneurs associations and academic environment participated to the public debates between April and May 2020; as a result of which a memorandum was filed to the Government.

Main conclusions of the campaign

• As we go from SMEs to large companies, the percentage of those who did not register losses in the beginning is rising now. At the same time, of the respondent companies, only micro-enterprises declared a profit growth (1.6%) and small companies (4.3%). This means that they were more flexible and adaptable to the changes and restrictions. Furthermore, large companies seem to not be so affected by financial difficulties (69%). Although, 30% of medium companies, 30% of small companies and 33% of micro-enterprises declare that they are not in danger of bankruptcy.
• Digitalization: As a reaction to the restrictive measures of social distancing and activity hiatus, the business environment adopted digital measures in order to continue their activity. Through this survey we observed in order to acknowledge how many companies opted for this option and how they managed to implement it. The first result gathered indicated that 57% out of respondent companies have implemented digital measures immediately after the state of emergency was declared, while 43% did not adopt such measures.
• The SMEs digitalization program:Is part of the governmental program that is meant to relaunch economy, created by the Government to fight against the consequences of SARS-COV-2 epidemic and was introduced as a result of the Memorandum created within the “Construim impreuna #ViataDupaCovid19” campaign initiated by Ingenius Hub.