RUMORE – Innovation through Rural-Urban Partnerships

RUMORE (“Rural-Urban Partnerships Motivating Regional Economies“) improves regional innovation policies and capacities by fostering rural-urban cooperation and partnerships.

Rural areas and their actors are often neglected in innovation strategies and functional relations of urban economic clusters. The economic potential for jobs, growth and innovation continues to be unused if their strengths are insufficiently integrated in interdependencies and if synergy effects with rural regions remain unused by cities. RUMORE explores how regional innovation and value chains can be improved, which is done by encouraging intensified connections between urban and rural actors. The project’s objective is to strengthen knowledge exchange between urban and rural stakeholders, thereby reinforcing innovation and boosting the economy in both areas.

In RUMORE, six regions cooperate across Europe under the project leadership of HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU). These include the District Government Burgas (Bulgaria), the region Central Macedonia together with the Development Agency ANATOLIKI (Greece), the region Lombardy (Italy), the Green Knowledge Portal Twente and the City of Amsterdam (Netherlands) as well as the Council for Regional Development Lüneburg (Germany).

On the one side, the Interreg Europe programme promotes interregional exchange of different experiences. On the other side, policy instruments are selected within each partner region. These shall be improved based on the experiences of other project partners involved. Adapting funding priorities, revising the selection criteria or funding new thematic project calls are all considered to be possible ways of achieving this.

RUMORE has been approved in October 2016 in the second call of the Interreg Europe Programme.