The INTERREG project CHAIN REACTIONS that aims on “Driving smart industrial growth through value chain innovation”, will adjust its activities in order to reflect the current COVID-19 pandemic and its potential impacts on industrial value chains in the Central Europe region. The project deals with five key sectors based on their embedding in regional smart specialization strategies. These include...

The German biotech companies BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc. have announced that the German regulatory authority, the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, has approved the Phase 1/2 clinical trial for BioNTech’s BNT162 vaccine program to prevent COVID-19 infection. The trial is the first clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate to start in Germany, and is part of a global development programme. The company...

France Clusters has published new newsletters that aim to capitalisate initiatives and to enable readers to draw lessons at the end of the Covid-19 crisis. The newsletters is called PROJET SIMAC ( Suivi des Initiatives, Mesures, Actualités liées à la crise COVID19). To read edition 5 of this newsletter (in French) please click here. To read more newsletters and gain access to France Clusters...

The PropTech Bulgaria report on the effect of the pandemic has revealed that 38.5% of Bulgarian property technology (PropTech) companies have not encountered any decrease in demand for their services. For a part of these companies the corona crisis has even influenced the demand favourably. They are experiencing a considerable increase for services due to a number of decisive advantages, namely...

In Spain, the telematic engineering department of the University Carlos III de Madrid ( UC3M) and the Big Data institute UC3M-Santander are designing a tool that would use high resolution mobility patterns based in GPS geolocation. These mobility patterns will facilitate the development of selective confinements, which have proven to be effective in countries such as South Korea and would also...

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, Swedish healthcare is falling shorter in protective equipment by the day. After expressing the urgent need to replenish their supplies, more and more companies and cluster organisations are offering support, such as the Paper Province. With co-funding from the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, Region Värmland and Region Dalarn, Paper Province went...

Bring Global, one of the leading knowledge companies specialized in business and technology solutions, has just created a marketplace callled #UnitedAgainstCovid in order to suppport the matching of needs and supplies in the health sector during the current COVID-19 pandemic. The tool should support entities and health professionals and enables suppliers to contribute materials that will support...

A new ‘ support finder’ tool launched by the UK Government will help businesses and self-employed people across the UK to quickly and easily determine what financial support is available to them during the coronavirus pandemic. The finder tool asks business owners to fill out a simple online questionnaire, and then directs them to a list of all the financial support they may be eligible for. To...

A recent communication from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD) dedicated to the " Tracking and tracing of COVID: Protecting privacy and data while using apps and biometrics" was recently published. It highlights the following topics: Digital technologies, in particular mobile and biometric applications, are being adopted in innovative ways to improve the...

Amidst the disrupting circumstances resulting from the global COVID-19 pandemic, the study COVID-19 in the Mediterranean and Africa: Diagnosis, Policy Responses, Preliminary Assessment and Way Forward provides an analysis of the contagion between February and April 2020 in the Mediterranean and Africa. It assesses the level of preparedness of national healthcare systems and examines the policy...