Governance

The BSR Stars is a part of the EU Baltic Sea Strategy. It is a flagship within the action plan under research & innovation in the Strategy. This area is led by Poland, Estonia and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The BSR Stars is organized as a multi stakeholder programme and is interconnected with other flagships in the BSR Strategy and also to other EU strategies on competitiveness and innovation.

The BSR Stars programme is fundamentally about creating collaborative advantage that enables participants to better deal with complexity and shared problems of which Grand Challenges are both the most pressing and hopefully promising from an innovation perspective. To deliver on this new ways of collaboration has to be implemented with new forms of governance.

The grand challenge approach means that there is a need to orchestrate new forms of collaboration and to make cross-fertilization between strong milieus in the participating countries. The BSR Stars programme aims at making people meet with different experiences and competencies from different countries.

Furthermore it is important that the programme involves stakeholders with mandates that can remove obstacles for cooperation or influence new innovation policy design. Therefore there is a Steering Committee that has the overall strategic responsibility for BSR Stars. This group consists of representatives from ministries and from innovation agencies. The Steering Committee is responsible for the overall strategic decisions, governance and financing. The members represent their respective nations and shall have mandate to take decisions on behalf of their nation in questions related to this project.

There is also a project management organization that is responsible for the operational level of the programme and for giving input to the strategic Steering Committee. It is structured such that it supports the core activities in the programme which are the transnational collaboration projects on innovation: strategic alliances, linking research & innovation milieus, transnational cluster cooperation and SME-networking. The project management organization will also support the process through building capabilities among the programme participants and also work with marketing of the programme. In the knowledge management processes the secretariat work together with the sub programme leaders. The secretariat consists of the project managers from The Nordic Council of Ministers, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Every part of the programme will be led by one country and co led by another. The leaders of the different parts of the programme will also be members of the international secretariat. There will also be national contact points. In that way all countries will be involved in the running of the program.