Online Businesses are significantly different from traditional businesses due to a variety of factors such as relatively low entry costs, high word of mouth, low incremental costs, high efficiency of viral marketing strategies amongst others. Quick deployment, rapid prototyping, low cost of market tests and introduction along with the right business model and pricing strategy are some of the vital elements that can ensure success or failure. These challenges are quite daunting to cope even for seasoned entrepreneurs but much more challenging for younger entrepreneurs. While several startup initiatives, business accelerators and localised business support ecosystems have come up to provide these specialised skills and support services, the main barriers to a large scale web entrepreneurship ecosystem in Europe are: i) A significant gap between University Students who form the largest pool of potential young entrepreneurs and the business accelerators providing support to such initiatives. ii) Lack of internetworking between the various business accelerators, investors, mentors to coordinate their activities to reach a much wider audience across the widely dispersed European communities. iii) Lack of Business Analytical Tools that can help digital startups optimise their business models and pricing decisions. There is a strong need to develop an ecosystem of web entrepreneurship, where budding entrepreneurs can find the right support to let their ideas blossom into viable business models, with access to the necessary inputs such as funding, mentoring, and access to the necessary technical resources and IT skills. That is why 2 business accelerators from 2 different European regions: Portugal and Scandinavia came together to develop a coordinated set of support actions with the coordination of an academic partner (UNIDEMI) to leverage the use of the largest European Startup Web- Platform F6S for a range of activities that support web-startups.

BioReg project proposes to create a platform of stakeholders who are able to influence and develop their regions towards bio-based industries and products. Demonstrator case studies have been selected among European regions – Gothenburg, (SE); Karlsruhe, Baden-Wurttember (Ge), Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna (IT), North West England (UK) and Vorarlberg and Syria, Austria. Those have set up renewable wood waste-based systems at different stages of the waste wood value chain including different wood waste source, pre-sorting, sorting, collection, recycling and wood waste treatment (to materials, biochemicals or biofuels) as well as the different gradings and regional wood waste composition in each country. 3 recipient regions were selected for this project in regards to their unused waste wood potential: Normandy (France), Lublin (Poland), Andalucia (Spain). The BioReg platform will function on two levels. On the EU level: best practices in terms of strategies and technologies as well as implementing mechanisms will be shared with the beneficiary recipient regions on the project and disseminated to many other potential regions in the EU (EUBIA). The platform will will encourage the collaboration of members and stakeholders on the European level. On the regional level: the best practices will be replicated in the three beneficiary regions. The proposal offers collaboration with regional existing clusters, constructive dialogue with regional authorities and policy makers, industrial and RTD establishments in the recipient regions. It will mobilize the recipient regions to develop the existing potential for industrial innovative projects and build bio-based ecosystems. Industries, regions and investors will be brought together to establish an efficient dialogue so that demand and supply can be aligned and large impact projects can be realized. The project proposes mechanisms to engage the stakeholders in collaboration also after the EU funding on BioReg is over.