The MUA holds the responsibility for the identification and selection of the Transfer Partners that will integrate to the Partnership.
The process of identifying Transfer Partners should start already at the application stage, when applicants are asked to identify other European urban areas that could benefit from replicating the proposed solution in view of the favourable conditions for transfer (similar characteristic, contexts) or of increasing their innovation potential; to elaborate on how the most suitable Transfer Partners will be identified; and if already identified, specify potential Transfer Partners together with the underlying motivations/rationale.
Since one of the EUI-IA’s objectives is that project outputs will be used by other cities, increasing the impact of the whole Initiative and that the ambition of the EUI-IA is to increase the replicability of the innovative solutions developed by the projects, it is important that projects at application stage can demonstrate a well-elaborated process, rationale and motivation behind the selection of the most suitable Transfer Partners.
Transfer Partners must be identified at the latest during the Initiation Phase and successful completion of the Initiation Phase is conditioned by Transfer Partners signing, as minimum, letters of intent. Signing of the Partnership Agreement is the next step required to launch Work Package Transfer and to launch the transfer of the first part of the lumpsum for Transfer Partners (please see below for the details).
The selection of the Transfer Partners should allow: (i) to maintain a good balance in terms of variety of cities involved in the Partnership (their size (small, medium-sized, large cities) and localisation (less-developed, transition and more developed regions)), and (ii) to gather the most relevant Transfer Partners for the quality of the replication activities.
Therefore, the selection of the Transfer Partners will follow some guiding principles:
- Transfer Partners come from different EU Member States;
- At least two of the four cities involved (MUA + the 3 Transfer Partners) are located in less developed or transition regions[1]
- The partnership includes cities of different sizes.