NEW WEBINAR SERIES - JANUARY 2024 !
EU-Japan Regional & Clusters Cooperation Matchmaking Webinars  
Meet Japanese Prefecture & Clusters
Learn more from experts about the 4 themes below and meet new partners during pitching/matchmaking session !



! Registration online !

B2MAtch Platform




Past webinar series about "Good Practices Cooperation"

 Click here for more informations



EU-JAPAN REGIONAL & CLUSTER COOPERATION

Annual Conference & Matchmaking

Clusters, European Regions, Japanese Prefectures & Major Cities

16-17 January 2024

Online Conference & Matchmaking session


! Conference recording online soon !

SHORT-TERM MOBILITY PROGRAMME

With the short-term mobility programme, 10 shortlisted European cluster managers will be granted the opportunity to travel to Japan in order to find their counterpart and strengthen their international outreach.


EU-Japan Regional and Cluster Cooperation Helpdesk

 The EU-Japan Regional and Cluster Cooperation Helpdesk, launched by the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation (a joint initiative of the European Commission DG GROW and the Japanese Government under METI) is a new regional cooperation platform mobilizing European regions and clusters, Japanese Prefectures and clusters throuh the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), and the EU-Japan Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity, signed by Prime Minister Abe and President Juncker in Brussels on September 27th, 2019.

The EJR2C Helpdesk will promote cooperation in terms of industry, trade, investment, innovation, tourism, and mobility of people. This cooperation will be bilateral between European and Japanese stakeholders, but it may also include the EU+Japan teaming up in regards to third countries, in regions such as Africa, South East Asia, Latin America, or countries neighboring the EU.

Do you want to join us ?

Join the platform and stay in touch with our actions !
Join us →


What's new & exciting

04 May, 2023
Discover the full version
23 Mar, 2021
SME INTERNATIONALISATION AND DIGITALISATION The covid-19 pandemic is a powerful trigger and accelerator of the digitalisation of business support services towards the internationalisation of SMEs, for example: •The digitalisation of business matchmaking services ena-bles increased outreach to many more SMEs as compared to physical matchmaking. It also opens the door to a new profile of SMEs which would have never participated in physical business missions outside the EU (covid-19 or not) by lack of time, money and staff. Hence, reaching out a hid-den part of the SMEs world with big potential. •Virtual business matchmaking has become a crucial asset for SMEs to survive these economic difficult times without dropping their internationalisation strategy. It enables them to continue building international partnership as it reduces the transaction costs and save resources. •Digitalisation also enables SMEs to evaluate more quickly and more regularly new markets and business oppor-tunities. They are then able to react more quickly to opportunities and threats with respect to changing market attractiveness. They can internationalise early, flexibly and fast, with fewer travel costs and less time.•Although the negative impact of the coronavirus crisis on businesses is a serious problem, it has also triggered a surge of new start-ups being set up in Europe, Japan and the US. As mentioned in a recent FT article (https://www.ft.com/content/3cbb0bcd-d7dc-47bb-97d8-e31fe80398fb), 10,000 new businesses were registered in September 2020 in Japan, 14% more than in the same month last year. France registered 84,000 new businesses in October 2020, up 20% on the same month last year and the highest ever recorded. •Given the major trend for EU-Japan business cooperation in third markets, digitalisation facilitates tri-lateral business matchmaking between the EU, Japan and third countries. They can more easily go beyond bilateral cooperation between the EU and Japan, and hence project EU-Japan business partnership to third countries, e.g., Asia or Africa. Digitalisation and internationalisation go hand in hand to provide opportunities to many more SMEs, for internationalising in a cheaper, faster, greener, more global and flexible ways, and delivering higher productivity compared to the ‘usual’ physical practice.It is dramatically changing patterns of entrepreneurial opportunity pursuit, value creation, innovation in the economy, and internationalisation. The 4th ‘industrial revolution’ is upon us. Does it mean that the above digitalisation assets for building international business partnership will make obsolete the regular physical journey? Probably not, as no matter how easy and effective it is to talk digitally, there is something else that face-to-face communication brings. Business is about building relationships and trust. It has an emotional dimension that a real-word event can – for the moment – enable more easily than a virtual one. The key challenge is likely to be how best to articulate the assets of digitalisation with the ones of the physical way. Perhaps via a double step approach, with first a large digital business matchmaking, followed by a much smaller physical one for finetuning. Dr. Philippe de Taxis du PoëtManaging Director, EU-Japan Centre for Industrial CooperationMinister Counsellor, Delegation of the EU to Japan Discover the full version
05 Mar, 2021
Thank you for attending the webinar. Your views on the program are important to us. Please provide feedback on this webinar series by completing this survey. Thank you!
Show More
Share by: