The SCAIRA project, a three-year initiative co-funded by the Interreg SUDOE program that aims to develop a customised training program to support the creation and acceleration of start-ups in rural areas, held its second face-to-face consortium meeting in the Portuguese region of Coimbra on June 25-26. The two-day event was organized by the HIESE business center at its headquarters in the sunny town of Penela and brought together representatives of the twelve project beneficiaries.

The first day of the meeting assessed the current status of the project. Each partner presented a report on their work, highlighting significant achievements and thought-provoking findings since the inaugural conference held in Toulouse (France) in January, organized by Aerospace Valley, the project coordinator.

One of the most important points was how the project would be affected by the departure of partner IMT Mines Albi, which announced its withdrawal for technical reasons just before the meeting. In this regard, given the versatility of the consortium, one of the solutions put on the table was to divide the workload and simplify the schedule of actions for 2024.

Another important item on the agenda of the first day was SCAIRA’s communication and dissemination strategy. In particular, the partners exchanged ideas on how to involve stakeholders and which channels and promotional materials to use in the segmentation process.

On the second day of the meeting, the consortium focused its presentations on the services that the program aims to provide (administrative services, technical services and business services) to entrepreneurs participating in SCAIRA.

Finally, to fittingly conclude the second face-to-face consortium meeting, SCAIRA partners saw firsthand why this Portuguese region is so technological by visiting the IPN institute and the Penela Fablab.