Six regions across Northern and Eastern Europe are joining forces through VIVA to help promising innovations move towards implementation and scale, while opening new pathways for knowledge, expertise and opportunities to travel across regional borders. The four-year Horizon Europe initiative has officially launched, bringing its consortium together in Halden, Norway, on 15–16 September 2026 to begin turning this shared ambition into action.
VIVA, Vertical and Horizontal Integrating Innovation Valley Approach, brings together 15 organisations from six countries, connecting three Nordic innovation-leading regions with three emerging innovation regions in Eastern Europe. Coordinated by Østfold County Council in Norway, the project will run for 48 months.
Europe has no shortage of promising ideas. The challenge is turning more of them into solutions that can be tested, adopted and scaled while ensuring that regions can benefit from one another’s expertise, infrastructure and opportunities.
VIVA addresses these two challenges together. It will help innovations progress towards market readiness while building stronger connections between regional innovation ecosystems. Rather than treating innovation development and regional cooperation as separate challenges, VIVA combines them in one approach: innovation moves up, while knowledge moves across.
“VIVA’s success will not be measured only by one project or reports, but by the lasting relationships, networks and opportunities that we create together,” said Camilla Aas from project coordinator Østfold County Council, who welcomed the consortium to Halden.
Helping innovation move forward and across borders
At the heart of VIVA is a simple idea: regions do not need to have the same strengths to innovate successfully together. Their differences can become an advantage when expertise, infrastructure and opportunities are connected in the right way.
The six participating regions bring complementary areas of expertise. Østfold in Norway contributes strengths in human-centric robotics, deep tech and advanced manufacturing; Västra Götaland in Sweden in circular textile flows and human-centric automation; and Österbotten in Finland in renewable energy, sector coupling and industrial symbiosis.
In Eastern Europe, Plovdiv in Bulgaria contributes expertise in circular bioeconomy and agricultural innovation; Alba Iulia in Romania in digital transformation, artificial intelligence and smart infrastructure; and Central Transdanubia in Hungary in agri-food innovation, digitalisation and sustainability.
VIVA will connect these strengths through sister-region cooperation and Nordic and Eastern European Innovation Nexuses, creating structured ways for regions to learn from one another and develop solutions together. Importantly, this is designed as two-way cooperation: expertise and innovation can move in both directions according to the strengths and needs of each region.
At the same time, VIVA will help promising innovations move closer to real-world application by looking beyond technological maturity to factors such as circularity, regulation, market and digital readiness. The result is a dual approach: helping individual innovations overcome barriers to scaling while helping regions overcome barriers to cooperation.
From six regional ambitions to one European collaboration
The consortium’s first meeting in Halden marked the point where VIVA moved from project design into implementation. During the two-day kick-off, all six regions presented their innovation priorities and flagship activities, helping partners connect the different regional strengths and explore how they can contribute to the wider VIVA collaboration.
The meeting also created space to turn these ambitions into practical cooperation. Partners explored VIVA’s methodology and Innovation Nexus approach, discussed the upcoming cascade-funding mechanism and worked together through an interactive World Café focused on four areas central to the project: cascade funding, communication, methodology and Nexus development, and technology transfer. The discussions provided an early opportunity to identify connections across work areas and shape priorities for the next phase of implementation.
The programme also took the conversation beyond the meeting room. In Moss, partners heard directly from Tronrud Engineering, Physical Robotics and Aurelian Manufacturing, before visiting the Tronrud Engineering factory. The visit offered a tangible introduction to advanced manufacturing and robotics, areas closely connected to the innovation strengths that Østfold brings to VIVA.
What comes next
The Halden meeting was only the starting point. Over the next four years, VIVA will turn the cooperation established between the six regions into concrete joint activities.
The project plans to test its approach through regional flagship pilots, establish shared mechanisms for interregional cooperation and launch its first cascade-funding calls within the first year. Through these activities, VIVA aims to give innovators access to funding, expertise, test facilities, regional networks and potential partners beyond their own regions, helping promising solutions move closer to implementation and market uptake. Over its lifetime, VIVA aims to support more than 30 interregional innovation projects through cascade funding, with a focus on helping innovations progress towards market readiness. The experience generated across the six regions will feed into an open-source Innovation Valley Method Manual, designed to make VIVA’s methods and lessons available beyond the consortium.
Ultimately, VIVA’s ambition is not simply to connect six regions for the duration of one European project. It is to demonstrate how regions with different capabilities can combine their strengths, help innovations progress and build lasting connections that contribute to a stronger and more balanced European innovation landscape.
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