On November 4th, the first CORE Technical Committee meeting took place in the inspiring ‘Maritime Single Window’ House in Brussels. The technical committee is composed of all WP leaders and meets every 6 months to exchange and discuss technical progress, discuss coordination issues and proposes actions to support better coordination.
After having discussed the CORE Innovation Agenda and corresponding coordination approach, mapping project contributions to the concept development cycle of the key CORE concepts, we discussed effective ways to coordinate, respecting demonstrator autonomy to follow their specific demonstration agendas but also avoiding ending up with 22 separate sub projects.
The cluster approach was presented and agreed upon as a balanced way, grouping the 22 WPs in 4 clusters: Risk related capabilities (WP2-5), IT solution environment (WP6-8), Demonstrators (WP9-17) and Other (requirements, dissemination, wider stakeholder engagement, policy development and impact assessment).
Within these clusters there is need for coordination on scoping, focusing and complementarities between the WP’s, but also the linkages and coordination aspects with the other clusters. Cluster workshops, such as the one in Athens, focusing on a particular cluster and also identify and sharpening the links and dependencies with other clusters, have proven to be very constructive in this phase of the project. It was agreed to organize a next cluster workshop focusing on the Risk related capabilities.
Moreover, internal communication procedures have been reviewed to avoid overkill of emails and unnecessary administrative burden. Also the topic of stakeholder analysis and stakeholder strategy has been discussed. In order to achieve maximum impact, this has to be clear and dissemination and exploitation strategies have to follow this. All in all a fruitful day where we laid the foundation for a highly effective team of WP leaders.