Interreg Northern Periphery and Arctic - MakerSpace Project

NPA KET is a preparatory project (#NPA0200058) funded by the European Union’s Northern Periphery Artic region to undertake a value chain analysis of transdisciplinary “KET-enabled” makerspaces. The preparatory project is jointly implmented by partners from the University of Iceland and Centria University of Applied Sciences in Finland.

The “Green Deal” challenges academia and SMEs in European regions to transform economies by innovation. This, once in a generation challenge, requires new innovative capacities. Remote NPA regions require dedicated spaces for making objects – which we describe as makerspaces. Makerspaces allow multidisciplinary concepts to be investigated using digital tools in a laboratory environment. Providing access to these tools will inspire the next generation to scale concepts in future production environments. The competitiveness realised by such makerspaces depend on the deployment of disruptive tools based on key enabling technologies (KET-enabled makerspaces).  The ability to apply disruptive technologies or KETs (eg. advanced materials, printed electronics, photonics, robotics, connectivity, & artificial intelligence) presents an opportunity for resource efficient innovation which can increasingly inspire young people to commit to raising the competitiveness of SMEs across the NPA region.

The objective of this project is to understand how a broad constituency of stakeholders across the NPA region can contribute to, and apply, KET-enabled makerspaces to contribute to the innovation capacity of region. The project will apply a value chain analysis methodology to identify how KET-enabled makerspaces can best meet the expectations of regional stakeholders.  The main output of the project will be a heat map in the form of a transnational value chain. This output will assist each partner to identify transnational actions and relevant to future key stakeholders which will serve as inputs to a full NPA inter-regional project.

NPA KET is a preparatory project (#NPA0200058) funded by the European Union’s Northern Periphery and Artic region to undertake a value chain analysis of transdisciplinary “KET-enabled” makerspaces. The preparatory project is jointly implemented by partners from the University of Iceland and Centria University of Applied Sciences in Finland.