Brussels, 6 November 2025 — At the I3 Newcomers Coordinator’s Event hosted by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA), Digital Innovation Zone (DIZ) presented SustainX as a flagship example of how less-developed regions can shape and operationalise interregional investment cases that accelerate Europe’s green and digital transformation. Representing DIZ, Cristina Baghiu (Hub Coordinator) highlighted how SustainX is redefining collaboration between regions, public authorities, SMEs, and innovation actors.
A Pan-European Programme for Emerging Innovation Regions
SustainX has been developed as a pan-European programme to be implemented in Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Spain (Canary Islands). Its core mission is to identify, support, and structure investment-ready innovation projects that drive both the green and digital transition in less developed regions.
The initiative operates through several key mechanisms:
● Selecting SME innovation cases with strong scalability potential in green and digital sectors.
● Treating each region as a “learning node”, piloting solutions and testing collaboration models before they are replicated across the consortium.
● Engaging public authorities as core partners, ensuring alignment with Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) and compliance with ERDF programme rules.
● Co-creating with managing authorities a unified investment-support model, designed from the outset to fit public-funding mechanisms.
The SustainX case study presented by the DIZ team also opened an interactive workshop on building synergies and success strategies for I3 projects, demonstrating step-by-step how to design interregional investment funnels.
Anchoring Innovation in Regional Strategies
A defining feature of SustainX is the active involvement of key actors from each region. Their participation ensures that investment cases feed directly into policy planning and S3 roadmapping, securing long-term continuity beyond the project’s timeline.
As a result, SustainX functions not only as a support programme but also as a policy-aligned investment accelerator, embedding green and digital innovation into regional development strategies.
Through SustainX, DIZ and its partners demonstrate that regions with limited access to investment tools can become active contributors to European value chains. By combining structured pipelines, public-authority engagement, and unified investment-support frameworks, the project shows how coordinated interregional action can unlock scalable innovation across Europe.
A Cornerstone of DIZ’s European Innovation Strategy
SustainX plays a key role in DIZ’s mission to connect Romania’s North-East region to the wider European innovation ecosystem. By driving both the green and digital transition, the programme provides SMEs with a unified pathway from idea to scale-up, strengthening regional capacity while contributing to Europe’s broader transformation goals.
