SMEs Support

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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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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CAST — CApacity building for success – foSTering youth professional realization and employability

Grants, Projects, SMEs Support /

Youth employability programmes often stop at training — CAST’s partnership pushed further, building an actual employer-facing platform so that new skills could translate into real job connections, not just certificates. GAUSS’s decision to add tactile-graphics workshops for blind persons, beyond what the project formally required, reflects a broader principle: employability initiatives are only as inclusive as the groups they actively choose to reach.

For the GAUSS Institute, CAST extended its long-standing accessibility and tactile-heritage expertise — first developed through projects like ALTER TRIP — into a new international context, while also demonstrating its capacity to lead communications for a large, eight-country Erasmus+ consortium.

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Implementation of a Document Management System (DMS) for the Business Start-up Centre – Bitola (BSC Bitola / Business Incubator)

Digital Tools, Projects, Services, SMEs Support /

Small institutions like a regional business incubator rarely have the budget for enterprise document-management software, yet they face exactly the same problems as larger organisations: who can see this file, which version is current, and how do we find it again in six months. By building on an open-source platform rather than a paid one, GAUSS gave BSC Bitola a genuinely sustainable system — one it could keep running indefinitely without a recurring licence bill.

This 2010 project sits early in GAUSS Institute’s portfolio of practical, cost-conscious IT and knowledge-management work for local institutions in the Pelagonia region — a thread that continues through its later platform and digital-heritage projects, and reflects a consistent preference for open, sustainable technology over proprietary lock-in.

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Grants, Projects, SMEs Support /

BalkanMed e-BP gave exporting SMEs in five countries something that hadn’t existed before: a single, shared digital space to be found by, and find, business counterparts across the wider Balkan-Mediterranean region — backed by analytical tools built jointly rather than duplicated five times over. For North Macedonian SMEs, it meant a direct, low-cost channel into export markets and cooperation networks in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Albania.

For the GAUSS Institute, BalkanMed e-BP marked a step beyond locally-delivered projects into leading a full Work Package for a five-country transnational consortium — coordinating research, data collection and tool development across partners with different languages, institutions and working cultures, and demonstrating the Institute’s capacity to manage complex, EU-funded transnational cooperation.

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Economic and Social Stabilization Programme for Vulnerable Social Groups Residing in Border Communities (ESS)

Projects, SMEs Support, Uncategorized /

The consortium: ETC–Bitola and GAUSS Institute, implemented the research, training, and consultancy components of IOM’s Economic and Social Stabilization (ESS) Programme for Vulnerable Social Groups Residing in Border Communities. The Institute conducted an original study on the local economy and business potential of the Municipality of Bitola, delivered two rounds of business skills training to 19 beneficiaries, and provided 24 hours of individual consultancy to 12 participants before and after they launched their businesses. The project combined evidence-based research with hands-on capacity building to support entrepreneurship among socially vulnerable groups, with a strong focus on women’s economic empowerment in the Bitola border region.

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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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BeCircular – Boosting Employment through Entrepreneurship in Circular Economy

Circular Economy, Projects, SMEs Support /

Project Funded by Interreg IPA Cross Border Cooperation Programme “Greece – Republic of North Macedonia 2014-2020” Role in the project: Beneficiary / Partner Project Partners: BECircular converts Circular Economy (CE) /Bio-Economy (BE) routes into employment hubs through the development of:a) Repair & Reuse center for specific waste streams involving suppliers, end-users, repair lines & sponsors.b)

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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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