The awards aim to highlight innovative projects with a clear Arctic dimension, which are viewed as inspirational in their participating regions as well as being seen as creating real measurable impacts on the ground, and being of direct benefit to Arctic communities.
Each year two categories are open for submissions and a jury of 5 representatives from the Arctic Cooperation programmes selects one winner per category.
During 2020, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Interreg, for this reason the categories of the award have been refocused on one of the themes of Interreg’s anniversary: youth cooperation.
In the category: Arctic Entrepreneurial Spirit the winner of the 2020 Arctic Award is the project:
BRIDGE, Barents Region Initiative for Development Growth and Employability, funded by the Kolarctic ENI CBC programme.
The BRIDGE project has demonstrated:
- focus on enhancing young people’s entrepreneurial skills and employability, as well as creating networks between potential employees and employers,
- the ability to tackle relevant day-to-day demands of both universities and SMEs,
- concrete potential to produce a permanent impact on the practices of the participating higher education institutions and the SMEs, such as improvement in employment rates and quality of the workforce.
In the category: Overcoming Critical Mass the winner of the 2020 Arctic Award is the project:
FUTURE CLEANTECH SOLUTIONS, funded by the Interreg Botnia Atlantica programme.
The FUTURE CLEANTECH SOLUTIONS project has demonstrated:
- a concrete cooperation model innovating CleanTech businesses in the Kvarken region, as well as natural resources and equality in the region,
- answering to the needs of sparsely populated areas by means of clustering, promotion of clean-tech solutions and creation of vertical links between Arctic companies,
- an approach that is agile and relatively easy to scale up and deploy in other parts of the Arctic.
The winners were announced on the Arctic Cooperation Facebook page, with a dedicated video which can be watched at this link: https://youtu.be/RigJgwYg2N4
We hope that the global situation will improve quickly and that it will soon be possible to celebrate the winners in person at an event.
We congratulate the winners!