COM 3

COM3 – Buidling COMpetencies for COMpetitive COMpanies

The challenge

About 40 m people or 20% of the North Sea Region’s population live in rural areas. A large share of businesses in the region’s rural areas are small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). These businesses are particularly vulnerable and faced with a number of uncertainties and challenges that the digital transformation poses to them:

  • Many SMEs in many rural areas do not know and are not aware of their digital needs and potentials. This, in turn, makes it difficult for them to proactively apply digital technologies in their business operations.
  • Other rural businesses have already gone further in their digital transformation. But constantly keeping up with rapidly developing technologies and changing business models is not always easy for them.
  • Accessing new markets, scaling up and cooperating in a transnational environment are other areas that often pose challenges to rural SMEs.

To help SMEs overcome these challenges and to fully exploit local potentials for rural innovation and smart growth throughout the North Sea Region, a change of mind-set is needed.

The COM3 approach

This is where the COM3 project comes into play. COM3 partners focus on the mediatory role of local or regional authorities as innovation facilitators and enablers. We believe that strengthening and empowering these important local and regional actors is the best way to create a dynamic environment in which rural SMEs can improve their tech-readiness and fully benefit from the advantages of digital technologies. The ultimate goal of COM3 is to give rise to tech-enabled and tech-branded rural areas, in which rural enterprises are able to grow and scale up based on their local capacities and through enhanced adoption of digital technologies.

To reach this goal, COM3 partners are…

Welcome to join us on our journey towards tech-enabled and tech-branded rural areas in the North Sea Region!

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