Enterprise Europe Network (Malta) 2016: A Year in Review
The MBB forms part of the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) made up of over 600 support business organisations in all regions of the EU and in other key global markets beyond our peripheries. The main objective of this service is to open doors for European SMEs that wish to grow by helping them tap the various EU-provided opportunities that are available.
In 2015, MBB joined Malta Enterprise, the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry and the Malta Council for Science and Technology, forming a local consortium whereby the MBB’s resources and expertise have been pooled to create a consolidated and value-added service to the local business community.
Through the local consortia of EEN service providers, local SMEs can now be increasingly connected to other markets, have access to information ranging from EU policy to international tenders and have the facilitated means to connect with businesses from all sectors.
This year, MBB’s work became increasingly aligned with the aim to render the EEN service to the local business community in providing a significant and clearly demonstrable impetus to the client’s competitiveness at European level, thus leading to an improvement of its economic situation.
Consortia Achievements 2016:
In a concerted effort to help local SMEs take operations to a higher level, EEN Malta has:
Organised 12 successful events
Produced 6 successful cross-border partnerships
Provided Individual Advisory Support to 98 clients
Organised 24 company missions and brokerage events
Informed the local business community on the potential on the potential impact European Commission legislative proposals and initiatives could have on their businesses. As a result the feedback concerns and opinions of 713 Maltese businesses was channelled directly to the European Commission.
Provided 19 local companies with advisory services that have led to an improvement in their economic situation
Provided 31 Tender and EU Funding Alerting Services
Enterprise Europe Network Vision 2017 – 2018
The major focus for MBB in 2017 and 2018 will be to target a number of local SME companies in various sectors, to obtain opinions and feedback both on existing and forthcoming Community legislation and initiatives.
In particular, MBB will focus on the following activities:
- Contacting, informing, inviting, consulting local companies within the framework of the SME panel consultations and submitting SME responses to the European Commission. This will be done with the aim of hashing out certain problems that SMEs face in the Internal Market. The cases recorded will set the grounds for improvements of problematic areas on a national scale.
- Directly promoting public consultations launched by the European Commission so as to directly help SMEs to encode responses in EU surveys.
- The MBB will be informing SMEs on evaluations roadmaps and consultations on new Commission initiatives that are likely to affect businesses.
- Advisory services to help SMEs move on to international markets
MBB representing interests of the local Tourism Sector , through EEN:
The MBB currently forms part of the Tourism Sector Group. The MBB’s strategy is to further cooperate with the Tourism Sector Group so as to be able to pro-actively help follow-up and inform tourism businesses of new developments at EU level, exchange good practice with relevant stakeholders and connect local SMEs within the sector to new developments in the area of skills and administrative simplification.
Next year, special efforts will be made to build relations with local clients in the tourism sector so as to be able to follow up with developments that are relevant to their needs, especially in the areas of the collaborative economy, the digitalisation of SMEs, EU funding and other sources of finance relevant to SMEs in this sector.
