Background

The five neighbouring countries around the Alps share and divide in many linguistic / cultural similarities and diversities: the German speaking part of Switzerland, the French speaking part, Romandie, the German speaking region of Munich as part of Oberbayern, the Italian part, Ticino, with Italy. The transnational Alpine vision will allow to overcome this traditional split and help to develop new partnerships. This is particularly important in the technology / knowledge transfer and in the support of small and medium sized enterprises, where trust and direct contact are known to be the keys to success. The competitive biotech and medtech sectors are particularly well suited for such a trans-national clustering approach since the individual regions have each strong points in the bio/medtech sectors, but fail to reach a critical mass in size to be competitive on a world-wide scale.

Due to the isolation of the region by the Alps, there is very small connectivity of the regions and visibility of the life sciences sector amongst themselves and outside. There is a high global competition of large territorial clusters in life sciences. Alpine Space need to define a strong identity based on its comparative advantages to obtain an international visibility and reputation.
The objectives to overcome these geographical and economic problems are described below and the counter-actions are detailed in the WP.