Innovations

RENAISSANCE

Innovations, Projects, Services, SMEs Support /

Cross-border agricultural development projects live or die on unglamorous groundwork: reliable survey data collected consistently across two countries, and a communications backbone that actually reaches the graduates and farmers it’s meant to serve. Applying an Agile, sprint-based methodology to field surveys — normally the domain of long, front-loaded research plans — let GAUSS adapt quickly as issues surfaced, rather than discovering problems only at a final deadline.

For the GAUSS Institute, RENAISSANCE paired its established communications and e-learning capabilities with two specialist experts recruited specifically for the assignment — an agricultural economist for the survey work and one of the region’s most experienced business-acceleration practitioners for the accelerator groundwork — showing a consistent pattern in its portfolio: bringing in the right named specialist for each contract rather than stretching its existing team across every domain.

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“Children@Game.Edu.NATO

Digital Tools, Grants, Innovations, Projects /

Public diplomacy aimed at children usually runs one direction: an institution decides what young people should know, then delivers it. Children@Game.Edu.NATO ran the process in reverse — asking nearly 1,500 children what NATO already meant to them, and only then building the explanatory manual and the teaching game around the actual gaps and misconceptions that surfaced. That the winning teaching tool was designed by students and teachers themselves, not commissioned from an agency, is precisely what gave GAUSS’s proposal its edge over a conventional awareness campaign.

For the GAUSS Institute, this was its first direct agreement with NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division — a different NATO relationship from the Bazaar-funded MOBILNOST and “New Vision” donations — and it drew on the same nationwide schools network and creative-industry skills (video production, translation, board-game design and printing) that GAUSS had built through earlier projects like HIVE.

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Study for an Integrated Information System of the Municipality of Bitola 

Digital Tools, Innovations, Projects, Services /

The most common failure mode of municipal e-government isn’t a lack of software — it’s exactly what this study found in Bitola: a decade of well-intentioned, disconnected purchases. The study’s contribution was refusing both easy answers. It didn’t recommend buying yet another system, and it didn’t pretend the existing ones could be perfectly unified; instead it designed a “meta-integration” that got real value — a single view of what citizens owe, municipal oversight of its utilities, traceable procedures, and online access for citizens — out of the systems already paid for.

For the GAUSS Institute, this 2009 study is the earliest documented piece of a pattern that runs through its whole portfolio: rigorous technical auditing in the service of practical public-sector decisions. It opened the institute’s three-project collaboration with SPARK and BSC Bitola — followed in 2010 by the document management system for BSC and the European Innovation Scoreboard study — and its themes (document workflows, citizen-facing e-services, integration keyed to real identifiers) resurface in GAUSS’s municipal ICT work for years afterwards.

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Study for Development of the European Innovation Scoreboard for the Republic of Macedonia

Innovations, Projects /

You cannot manage what you don’t measure, and in 2010 Macedonia had no way of measuring its own innovation performance against the EU standard it was working to join. This study didn’t just produce a one-off scoreboard — it produced a precise, indicator-by-indicator map of what statistics the country would need to start collecting (starting with a national Community Innovation Survey) if innovation policy was ever going to be built on evidence rather than assumption.

For the GAUSS Institute, this was an early demonstration of a role it would return to repeatedly in later projects: translating EU-level policy instruments and methodologies into something a national or local institution in North Macedonia could actually use, years before terms like “evidence-based policy” became common currency in the country’s own EU accession debates.

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HIVE — From Games to Business

Grants, Innovations, Projects, SMEs Support /

Accelerators live or die on whether anything real comes out the other end. HIVE’s answer was concrete: a finished game on Steam, built in Bitola by students, within the project year. For a small grant of $24,000, that outcome — plus 55 trained young developers and a functioning physical hub — showed the “eco-system” ambition in the project’s title wasn’t rhetoric: selection from game jams, acceleration, publication and alumni re-investment formed a genuine, repeatable cycle.

For the GAUSS Institute, HIVE was an early proof of a model it has kept applying since: pairing its own technical and project-management depth with a grassroots community partner (here MAGDA) to give young people in the Pelagonia region a route from enthusiasm to income. The connections seeded here — with FIKT, the gaming industry, and Greek partners in Thessaloniki — fed directly into GAUSS’s later creative-industry and cross-border work.

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HIVE – From Games to Business

Innovations, Projects /

HIVE – From Games to Business was an innovation and youth-employment project led by the GAUSS Institute in partnership with MAGDA and supported by the U.S. Embassy in Skopje. Through a dedicated accelerator space in Bitola, specialized mentoring, and five practical trainings, the project supported young game-development teams in turning ideas into market-ready products, strengthened entrepreneurial and digital skills, and demonstrated the potential of the video game industry as a driver of jobs, innovation, and creative enterprise in North Macedonia.

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Building a Cross-Border Circular Economy – BeCircular

Circular Economy, Grants, Innovations, Projects, SMEs Support /

BeCircular treated circular economy not as a waste-management topic but as a source of jobs — pairing Greek expertise in materials recycling and reuse with North Macedonian expertise in entrepreneurship training and business mentoring, so that each side’s strength filled a real gap on the other. For young graduates, technicians and artists in the Pelagonia Region, it meant a structured path from idea to business plan, backed by mentors and a dedicated centre rather than left to chance.

For the GAUSS Institute, BeCircular built directly on its earlier work on the SYMBIOSIS project’s composting-facility studies, turning that research experience into an operating entrepreneurship centre of its own — the Virtual Creativity & Entrepreneurship Center — and reinforcing GAUSS’s role as the region’s go-to partner for turning EU-funded research into hands-on business support for the Pelagonia Region.

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BalkanMed E-Business Pages (BalkanMed e-BP)

Digital Tools, Innovations, Projects, SMEs Support /

BalkanMed E-Business Pages (BalkanMed e-BP) — Interreg Balkan-Mediterranean 2014–2020 Transnational Cooperation Programme (Project Code: BMP1/1.1/2608/2017). Total project budget: €717,588.50. As Partner 4 in a five-country consortium (Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, North Macedonia, Albania), GAUSS Institute led the implementation of all project activities at national level, including the management and coordination of field researchers for SME data collection, organisation of a national business seminar, and contribution to the development of four cross-regional competitiveness tools (export analysis, good practices guide, cluster formation guidelines, and technology transfer guidelines). The project produced the BalkanMed e-BP Web Platform — a multilingual online marketplace connecting exporting SMEs, associations, and clusters across the Balkan-Mediterranean region — targeting a minimum of 1,000 registered SME profiles and 5,000 platform visits. The project demonstrated GAUSS Institute’s expertise in EU-funded project management, transnational research coordination, SME capacity building, and digital platform deployment within the Interreg framework.

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BalkanMed E-Business Pages

Digital Tools, Innovations, Projects, SMEs Support /

Funded by Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg Balkan-Mediterranean 2014-2020 Role in the project: Project partner/ Project Beneficiary Period of Implementation: 2017-2019 Brief Description of the Project The project tackles the common challenges of the BalkanMed area with regard to the distinct economic disparities in the region, the relatively low business competitiveness as compared to other European

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