Succession and Transfer of Business in Regions

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"After the creation and growth of a business, transfer is the third crucial phase in its life cycle." - Commissioners Tajani and Hahn, Foreword of Guidebook No. 3 - Facilitating Transfer of Business 2012. STOB regions project addresses the challenges of this third phase of business transfer in 9 EU regions. There has been a strong focus on start-ups across Europe, however, of equal importance is ensuring the survival of existing businesses. Safeguarding SMEs, arguably, has a higher impact on jobs and growth. This is reinforced by the fact that the success rate of transferred businesses is higher than that of start-ups. The STOB regions partnership brings a range of different experiences and levels of expertise, including regional authorities and business support institutions. The interregional approach explores and examines the challenges faced by succession and seek to find new or improved methods to support business transfers. Over 3 years of sharing experiences and participating in interregional learning, the partners benefit from improved knowledge on the various approaches across the regions. Peer reviews and workshops on specific topics related to business transfer will help promote the learning process and improve the implementation of ESIF programmes. STOB regions also offers input to the debate on both a European and regional level,encouraging greater attention on business transfer in the future cohesion policy with two high-level dissemination events. The strength of having a wide range of institutions involved guarantees knowledge sharing between regional stakeholders, feeding into the learning process as well as into regional action plans, a key output of the project. These plans will contain concrete projects that build on the good practices identified and transfer new ideas to partner regions with recommendations made for a future regional strategy to support succession. They will be implemented and monitored in the second phase of STOB regions.

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