Promoting Cross-Border Wood Construction Business (KA1021)
Funded by Karelia CBC 2014-2020

Objective of the project

Strengthening the business opportunities, markets and expertise in wood construction businesses across the border applying both B2B and U2B approaches bridging the key players together to work for the shared goal.

Main activities

• Conducting a thorough survey in the three cross-border regions (North-Karelia, Petrozavodsk and St. Petersburg) • building a coherent partner network to enable the consortium to design and create a feasible regular project involving all the key actors and potential businesses in the partner regions to reach the PROWO goals. • organizing four workshops to compile the future wheel and development & action plan for the development project.

Achievements

PROWO project conducted a thorough survey in the three cross-border regions including North Karelia, Petrozavodsk (Russian Karelia) and Saint Petersburg area. Each of the surveys was led by the university from the region involving local businesses. Organisations who were selected for the interviews were already established a cross-border cooperation or were considered as a potential business in this context. The group of interviewed organisations presented the different actors in the field of wood construction: from the raw material suppliers to contractors of the construction projects. Results of the interviews were analysed in order to recognise the most crucial bottlenecks and which are hindering the development related to cross-border cooperation from Finnish-Russian perspective. According interview results it is obvious that there is lack of knowledge in many fields in both side of border. The knowledge of markets in Finland or Russia, the building regulations, the design codes, the market channels, the market information, customer preferences and key players in markets are good examples of areas where more information is needed. The projects also tried to figure out the potential solutions to tackle those emerged bottlenecks especially from the university point of view but also from the business perspective. To help companies or other operators in markets it would be important to establish broad training program for all interested partners. This kind of program should be run in Finland and in Russia at the same time and also there should be possibility to combine to this visit in interested targets.