In 2016, MBB aligned its work as a local EEN contact point with the scope of providing additional advisory services and guidance to start ups and businesses in various sectors to help them better understand means and ways of tapping EU Funding streams.

MBB supported local SMEs by informing them on how, through EEN, they now have a greater opportunity to become increasingly connected with businesses from all sectors overseas thanks to the EEN’s extensive partnership database and have greater access to information ranging from EU policy to international tenders, participation in brokerage events, B2Bs, best practice visits and trade missions. Additionally, MBB also informed several businesses on the various existing local support measures and encouraged their uptake for greater impetus and competitiveness at local and European level.

To this effect MBB also organised a successful outgoing company mission to Estonia with 2 local companies in the services sector. A series of Service Design capacity building workshops were also held 2016, in MBBs capacity as a local EEN Network partner and Ambassador for the European Commission’s Design for Europe initiative. The workshops were targeted towards leading local businesses in the health, tourism and financial services with the aim of encouraging them to adopt various design thinking approaches and a variety of practical tools that have been made available through this EU initiative.

The workshops served as a guide to help companies discover and implement new tools and techniques which have been tried and tested by some of the world‘s leading businesses. Participant companies have since acquired the ability to assess their own business performance from a service design perspective.