On 09.04.2019 the Chamber of Commerce and Industry - Vratsa held an international conference "Danube: Innovation in flow", in the building of BCCI - Sofia. The event was held within the framework of EcoInn Danube, implemented under the Danube 2014-2020 Transnational Cooperation Program, where CCI-Vratsa is the leading partner in the communication and dissemination package of the project.

The main objective of the international conference was to disseminate the results achieved to the project among the general public as well as to present good practices of Bulgarian companies working in the field of eco-innovation, circular economy and waste management.

Partners in the project are organizations from 12 European countries along the Danube River, which have spent almost 3 years working together to achieve the general and specific objectives of the project. Representatives of all partners took part in the conference, as well as innovative companies from Bulgaria, eco-innovators, university lecturers, students, as well as representatives of projects from the priority axis "Innovative and Socially Responsible Danube Region" of the Danube Transnational Cooperation Program 2014 -2020 ".

The International Conference "Danube: Innovation in flow" was opened by Mrs. Iliana Filipova, Executive Director of CCI-Vratsa, who gave the floor to Mrs. Denitsa Nikolova, Minister of the Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism and Mr. Tsvetan Simeonov, President of BCCI. The presentation of the project was made by Nina Bratkova, a representative of the Slovak Center for Science and Technical Information, as a leading partner of the project.

The agenda of the event continued with the presentation of the pilot actions implemented under the project, after which was presented the Eco Virtual Lab - a web platform created with the aim of gathering eco innovators from the Danube region, offering or looking for eco-innovative solutions for energy problems or others.

In the same panel, Mr. Gabriel Vladut, an associate strategic partner in the EcoInn project, presented how eco-innovation is being implemented on the market. An interesting presentation was made by Hristo Aleksiev from Playground Energy, Bulgaria, which showed how children can generate electricity while playing on the cradles and climbers of playgrounds.

The next panel touched upon the subject of the Circular Economy. In the beginning, Vladislav Kartalov from CCI-Vratsa gave the word to students from the "Kozma Trichkov" school in Vratsa who presented eco-innovative products created during their business and entrepreneurship classes. Then there were 3 presentations of the activities of Bulgarian companies working in the sphere of the circular economy - "Geocycle Bulgaria", "BalBok energy" and "Vadima".

This was followed by presentation of Mrs. Andrea Pitzschke, project partner from Austria, who presented results, statistics and analytics from the reports made by each partners country in the project. Then Niko Natek from Slovenia, also a project partners, presented the Joint Strategy for eco-knowledge, elaborated for the needs of EcoInn Danube project.

At the end of the event, a capitalization between Danube projects took place, involving representatives of Bulgarian organizations. The projects were: MOVECO, DANUBIOVALNET, RESINFR@DR and CROWDSTREAM. Participation in the event was attended by more than 80 participants, who had the opportunity to learn about the results achieved under the EcoInn project, as well as to receive clear view of the activities of the eco-innovative companies in Bulgaria.