Public innovation intermediaries (such as business parks, innovation centers and innovation policy units) play a crucial role in providing innovation support measures, creating partnerships, finding innovative solutions and in raising the rate of innovation.

The lack of external links and limited co-operation of innovation intermediaries are an important drawback factor for a higher rate of innovation and therefore for generating growth and employment at regional level. This is often accompanied by low performance targets set by the funding authorities.

The Interregional Partnership Platform (IPP) is an INTERREG IV C project aiming to improve the capacity of regions for innovation by increasing the performance of innovation intermediaries at local and regional level in the partner regions in European co-operation and EU innovation programmes. The project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund with 1 million Euro and will run for a period of 36 months.

During the project the participating regions will identify and exchange successful access models to increase the outward orientation of innovation intermediaries and to develop a long-term framework of interregional know-how transfer among the local and regional actors. The partners will jointly implement successful practices in two pilot actions, and will develop a joint benchmark; monitoring and IT tool to regularly assess the participation rate of organizations.

After all the results of the co-operation would be used to give policy recommendations to improve innovation policies and in particular the structural funds mainstream programmes of the regions.