After a launch conference in 2018 and a mid-term event in 2019, the Danube S3 Cluster Project organizes its Final Conference on 21st of October 2021. Due to the COVID19 pandemic, the conference will be realized as an online event. It addresses agro-food cluster managers and members as well as other associations, networks, projects or single stakeholders, and also policy makers and public authorities, higher education and research organisations, SMEs, and civil society organizations dealing with clusters and/or agro-food from all across the Danube region.

The Final Conference will ensure the dissemination and visibility of the project activities and results all across the Danube region and facilitate their exploitation by relevant stakeholders. This will contribute to the project’s durability and sustainability and aid future projects by discussion lessons learnt from the implementation of the project. Furthermore, the conference will stimulate and support networking and dialogue between all relevant stakeholders in the Danube Region to improve the ecosystem of and framework conditions for agro-food clusters. In two keynotes and two panels, all project activities and results will be presented:

• development of a joint Danube S3 Cluster Strategy
• provision of innovation tools, audits and trainings for cluster managers and members
• implementation of 5 Local Action Plans and increase of cluster cooperation
• improvement of dialogie with policy makers and recommendations for further actions

For each of the Local Action Plans (LAPs) that were implemented within the project in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia, success stories will be presented concerning the three cross-cutting themes of the LAPs (healthy food, business models for circular economy and open innovation).

After a lunch break with the opportunity for networking, there will be a policy dialogue workshop in the afternoon, focusing amongst others on the newly established Danube S3 Cluster Network, which will be used to guarantee the sustainability of the project.