Mid of February the first DIGITRANS regional policy workshop was held in Stuttgart by the German partners MFG Baden-Württemberg and Böblingen district. Participants from SMEs, associations, universities, business support organisations and public administration where invited to develop a sustainability strategy. The aim of the regional policy workshops is to ensure that SMEs can benefit from the DIGITRANS methods and concepts after the project ends in June 2019.

The participating representatives from SMEs had already completed a DIGITRANS workshop and indicated their experiences. Sven Meinl, BUDAY GmbH, referred that ‘participation in the DIGITRANS workshop has established a new holistic mind set in the company.  New ideas and strategies are developed now consequently with a customer-centered point of view.’

Marcel Seyther, Seyther communication, added: “We experience service oriented professions in general under high pressure related to digitalisation. That’s why we gladly took the chance to participate in the DIGITRANS workshops. During our individual workshop the direct feedback from our attending customer helped us to develop a future-oriented digital business model.“

In a practical phase the workshop participants worked in groups on the basis of four central questions, to develop how DIGITRANS can be integrated in regional strategies and networks. Everyone was very motivated and interested that the DIGITRANS results and methods persist after the end of the project and a lot of ideas were created about how to provide the sustainability of the DIGITRANS outcomes. The project partners will start now to implement those until the DIGITRANS project ends, for instance by holding train-the-trainer-workshops to pass on the DIGITRANS method, by providing new material for trainers on the method and the setup of new incubators in the region, establishing close networks with existing digital hubs and increasing public relations about the benefits of the DIGITRANS results and methods for regional SMEs.