The European Platform for Sport Innovation (Epsi) hosted a meeting in Brussels on Jan. 25, to secure sport as a thematic area under the Smart Specialisation Platform for Industrial Modernisation (S3P- Industrial Modernisation). During the meeting, Alberto Bichi, in his capacity as Epsi's co-executive director, stressed the role that Epsi is playing in trying to connect the EU level with the regional level in the sports sector, and to improve the synergy between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The S3P platform was launched by the European Commission during the Smart Regions Conference, in June 2016, to offer hands-on support to regions to promote inter regional cooperation around matching smart specialization priorities related to industrial modernization. The customized support offered by the EU through this platform is supposed to generate investment projects, which could be funded through a variety of EU programmes such as Cosme, Horizon 2020, and the European Fund for Strategic Investment. The recent Epsi meeting brought together sports clusters, the EU officer responsible for S3P- Industrial Modernisation and representatives of the regions that have already identified sport as a priority on S3P-Industrial Modernisation - Lapland (Finland), Kaniuu (Finland), Province of Barbant (Netherlands) and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (France).

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