The S-ACCESS project is promoted by 7 Cluster organisations operating in the field of railway technologies, also extended to multi-modal technologies related to freight and logistics.
The Clusters are very experienced in internationalization activities for SMEs and strongly believe that the sectors where they operate are perfect for the development – under this Action – of new strategic approaches well re-applicable to other industrial sectors in Europe in order to support and increase SMEs’ participation in international public procurements.

The project covers 1.000 SMEs members of the 7 Partners and addresses as target countries USA, Canada and Norway.

Railways are a key sector in these countries and result to be very attractive from a public procurement perspective; moreover the Partners have chosen them for the following specific reasons:

• USA: it is the country our SME members are most interested in. This information comes from the implementation of the “PERES ESCP-4i” (2018-2019) where the Partners have previously worked on joint internationalization strategy and activities; the PERES Strategy, in fact, targets USA as first country and during the project implementation the Partners have made with a delegation of their SME members a “pilot study trip” of one week totally organised by themselves to Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Among its results, an MoU with “Ohio Small Business Development Center and Export Assistance Network (EAN) at Youngstown State University” has been signed in July 2019 and it is into force until December 2021. Hence, the Partners are ready to work on the USA and to capitalise on the knowledge and relationships already created;

• CANADA: the reasons behind this choice are several:
  the railway markets in USA and Canada, although separated, can well be addressed together, also in terms of potential local partnerships sought;
  in September 2018 at “InnoTrans” railway fair the Partners have started talks with the “Quebec Ground Transportation Cluster”3, that can be a perfect local partner – e.g. – for identifying local companies with whom to establish consortia for public procurements;
  some Partners have already in place exchanges with/received visits from Canadian public authorities;
  last but not the least, the Partners want to fully exploit the opportunities offered by the CETA FTA, and specifically the ones concerning unparalleled access to governmental public procurements also in the rolling stock sector (that before CETA were totally inaccessible) and opportunities for SMEs;

• NORWAY: the country has been chosen because
  it is one of EU nearest countries having a major investment plan for railways in the coming years;
  the country does not own an important rail supply industry, hence has to mostly rely on foreign suppliers;
  the country, being member of EEA(European Economic Area), implements the EU Directives on public procurements – having transposed them into Norwegian law;
  the country, being member of EEA, implements European standards defined within CEN-CENELEC, hence the ones our SMEs are used to, this avoiding extra-costs for compliance of their solutions to be charged in the bids;
  some Partners have already organized study visits to Norway and assessed the interest represented by the market.

The specific objectives the S-ACCESS project aims to achieve are :

• to give answer to the SMEs’ obstacles developing new strategic approaches and specific operational tools, also in collaboration with strategic stakeholders;
• to develop the Partners’ capacities in this respect so that this can become a standard offer of services to SMEs on continuous basis
• to discover market opportunities in the target countries, their key-rules and to identify all the target procurers;
• to prepare SMEs to the operational activities through specific training / mentoring, matchmakings with other European SMEs
• to use cross-cutting synergies with key stakeholders to better achieve the project objectives;
• to draft an Internationalisation Strategy and its Implementation Roadmap on the basis of the knowledge acquired;
• to organise incoming/outgoing missions from/to target countries to reinforce market knowledge, procurers’ knowledge and possible local partnerships for SMEs;
• to assist SMEs in seizing the opportunities both on individual basis and through SMEs consortia, organising matchings/meetings to the scope;