STAR
Supporting Training Around Regions
Contents
As predictable, the Enlargement of the European Union from 15 to 25 Member States has brought about remarkable consequences from the political, social and, in particular, from the economic point of view. While the productive sector is benefiting from a wider and more regulated market, many other sectors on the contrary have to face new trends, which often turn out to be quite disadvantageous. Companies in border regions suffer more than others from the high competitiveness coming from companies located beyond the other side of the border where production costs are lower. More and more often, in fact, companies in border regions are tempted from transferring their activities beyond the EU border. It means that many sectors in those regions are currently suffering from a period of crisis, many companies are not able to be competitive anymore, and many of them have to close their business activities. Consequently, workers from those regions have less and less job opportunities.
This problem has a fundamental importance for the European Commission, who has always been greatly interested in finding an equilibrium among its territories and solving competitive imbalances and instable situation caused by the enlargement to countries which have different levels of development.
In line with the EC commitments, at the end of 2005 the DG Enlargement launched a call for proposals, whose overall objective was to strengthen the competitiveness of regions and economic sectors particularly affected by enlargement by helping them to cope with social and economic changes resulting from enlargement and to identify new opportunities in an enlarged Union.
The project STAR - Supporting Training Around Regions has been submitted under this call for proposals. The project is managed by the Association of Veneto Chambers of Commerce and in particular by its Euro Info Centre, in collaboration with 9 partners coming from 6 different countries (Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Slovenia).
The objective of the project STAR is to improve the competitiveness of companies located in border regions delivering training actions and workshops on mass customization approaches which permit companies to be more competitive. Through mass customization, in fact, companies can offer their customers highly personalized products, different models and variants of products but at limited prices.
Customising products and services, while ensuring efficiency and timeliness, tends to place serious managerial and technological challenges, as customisation increases the complexity of the company´s operations, thus inducing higher costs and longer delivery times. Mass customization moreover requires specific competences to be implemented and it will be the very improvement of workers skills and competences in mass customization that the project STAR will pursue.
The project STAR aims in fact at filling this gap, offering workers the possibility to attend for free training courses that will create experts workers, able to implement a mass customization strategy in their companies. The target groups of the training activities are senior management of SMEs and senior unemployed, but experienced workers. An appropriate training would fill such competence gap, preventing these workers to silently oppose to change, while improving their capability to contribute to the success of the company´s innovation as well as their value in the job market.
The courses will be held by local experts, will focus basically on mass customization and will involve companies that already successfully implementing this methodology. Those companies will be interviewed and their experiences investigated in order to identify some success cases and case studies that will turn into training material for those who for the first time are approaching this methodology.
Moreover, in order to avoid the risk that new and innovative strategies remain un-useful and unusable because of a lack of knowledge in techniques of market share conquest, new competitive and strategic skills and competences will be taught. The session in mass customization will be joined by a session on internationalization issues. In class lessons will be enriched by the creation of an e-learning platform that will guarantee an high and personalized training experience.
3 training courses are going to be realized within the project: in Venice (IT) for the mechanic sector, in Thessaloniki (GR) for the textile sector and in Koper (SL) for the engineering and plastics processing sector. Two workshops, in Vratsa (BG) and Bekes (HU) are also foreseen.
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