What is Atlas

Introduction

On the initiative of the Province of Friesland and a number of Frisian export companies, Business Development Friesland and Farmco have developed the export innovation project ATLAS and are also responsible for the execution of this project.

The ATLAS project focuses on Small and Medium-sized Companies (SMEs) in the agri-food sector that are already exporting and wish to extend this. Participating companies have the ambition to achieve structural growth by exporting. The target of the project is to improve the export position in the direction of East European countries for at least 25 Northern-Netherlands SMEs operating in the agri-food sector.

Atlas in bullets

• Get supported within the provinces Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe by the efforts of Dutch coaches and Business Development Friesland
• Use the knowledge of local Atlas Ambassadors in your target country
• Automatically become a member of the World Trade Center network
• Issue a market survey or any other advice and receive up to Euro 10,000 of allowances
• Meet other exporting and supporting companies and broaden
  your network
  

Description

Smaller SMEs are insufficiently capable to utilize their export potential, because they are confronted with a number of export barriers. Because of this, companies miss export opportunities and turnover growth in the rising markets of Eastern Europe. The most important export barriers are the lack of knowledge of potential export markets and insufficient basic knowledge of export. On their own, smaller SMEs with export potential do not have the critical mass to set up an export network independently, but clustered with other companies they do.

The improvement of the export position of the 25 Northern-Netherlands SMEs will be reached by the development of a network of Frisian ambassadors in East-European regions, that together will constitute a network of agents, and by the development of a network in support of these agents. Furthermore the project will stimulate the use of the existing knowledge networks in Friesland. Experienced exporters will coach the entrepreneurs with the improvement of internal sales processes and their activities on the international market. The coach supports the entrepreneur also in increasing his knowledge level of export by using existing consultancy services and experts.

The project is based on the concrete demand of entrepreneurs and focuses on a target area that consists of regions in the countries that are most interesting from an agri-food perspective, namely: the Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Croatia and the Baltic States. The project will last 3 years and ends in April 2008. During the first period most attention will be given to coaching and knowledge development of the participating companies. After that, the network of participating companies and ambassadors will be activated on the base of the observed demand in the target area.