International IN2TECH Cross-Border Peer Exchange Workshop held as part of the IN4BLUE Project
14/07/2026
On Monday, 6 July 2026, the international online IN2TECH Cross-Border Peer Exchange workshop was held as part of the IN2TECH capacity-building programme within the IN4BLUE project (Social impact INcubators FOR strengthening the capacity of the Adriatic region to support the sustainable industry transformation of the BLUE economy sector). The workshop brought together 18 participants from six partner organisations in Croatia and Italy and was moderated by Goran Pavlov, representative of the project partner IRI Centar Ltd.
The workshop aimed to facilitate the exchange of good practices in the process of procuring the development of physical or digital product prototypes that support public-private-social business concepts identified during previous co-creation events. Each partner presented its business idea through a short pitch, which was assessed from the perspectives of social value, the blue economy, financial sustainability, and public-private partnerships. In total, six innovative business ideas related to the blue economy were presented.
Participants were divided into three Croatian-Italian teams, along with a separate validation team. During two working sessions, the teams used artificial intelligence (the Claude AI tool) to develop the Terms of Reference (ToR) and evaluation criteria for the procurement process, while the validation team simultaneously reviewed and assessed the prepared documentation. Each session concluded with a joint reflection, including feedback from the validators and an analysis of the quality of the developed documents.
The workshop concluded with a discussion of the key lessons learned, the most common mistakes in the procurement process, and the importance of quality assurance. This cross-border exchange of knowledge further strengthens the capacities of partners across the Adriatic region to support the sustainable transformation of the blue economy sector.
