September 21, 2026
The VIVA project— Vertical and Horizontal Integrating Innovation Valley Approach—launched in September and brings together stakeholders from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. Together, they aim to strengthen Europe’s innovative capacity by connecting regions with different areas of expertise and creating better conditions for knowledge, technology, and innovations to flow across both regional and national borders.
A central tenet of VIVA is to harness and connect the various strengths of the regions. Together, the six regions contribute broad and partially overlapping expertise in areas such as circular material flows, automation and robotics, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, industrial symbiosis, the bioeconomy, AI, and digital transformation. In Västra Götaland, the project’s specific focus is on circular textile flows and automation.
In this project, Innovatum Science Park will work closely with industry to identify needs and help ensure that promising solutions can be tested, validated, and brought closer to the market. Together with University West, Innovatum Science Park provides testing and demonstration facilities at the Production Technology Center in Trollhättan, where solutions in areas such as flexible material handling, AI-based automation, and robotics can be developed and tested in industry-relevant environments.
Innovatum Science Park will also facilitate interactions between companies, researchers, and other stakeholders through workshops, demo events, and matchmaking, and help ensure that the project’s knowledge and results reach the industry. A key part of this is supporting technology transfer and helping startups and scaleups further develop project results into new products, services, and business opportunities.
– What makes VIVA particularly interesting is that we connect regions with different strengths and enable expertise, experience, and solutions to flow across national borders. “For us at Innovatum Science Park, it’s about bringing western Sweden’s industrial expertise into a European context, but also about creating new opportunities for our companies to gain access to knowledge, testing environments, and collaborations in other parts of Europe—
” says Maria Olsson, project manager at Innovatum Science Park.
VIVA is a four-year initiative coordinated by Østfold County Council in Norway. The goal is for the collaboration to foster long-term relationships between the regions while helping more innovations make the leap to practical application and the market.
VIVA—Vertical and Horizontal Integrating Innovation Valley Approach—is funded by Horizon Europe and is a collaboration among 15 partners from six European countries. The project connects Østfold in Norway, Västra Götaland in Sweden, Ostrobothnia in Finland, Plovdiv in Bulgaria, Alba Iulia in Romania, and Central Transdanubia in Hungary. The project will run from September 2026 to August 2030.