The conference was organized by the ARC Fund on behalf of the ECAbit, and co-organized by the Technical University – Gabrovo, the Municipality of Gabrovo, and EEN – Bulgaria. The conference had two major sector foci – tourism and green energy. It provided also the opportunity of company visits and matchmaking opportunities between participants and local businesses.

Most important lessons learned and shared by ECAbit members and guests included the following:

• Academic entrepreneurs, although being the most powerful non-institutional intermediaries between academia and business, are often subject to negative attitude from both their colleagues at universities and private sector. The most important need is thus the public recognition of this role in society backed up with better institutional arrangements for academic entrepreneurship and commercialization of R&D.
• Specialized incubators are more effective for setting up local innovation networks including links to R&D. Good practice examples in the network represent ICT, bio-tech and agro-business/eco-tourism incubators;
• IT incubators are good starting points in ECA for specialized incubators with ‘low-cost labs’. At the same time there is a need to focus on higher value added businesses and ICT enabled innovation development in related companies.
• Skill set of manager at founding stage differs from manager at growth stage (this refers both to tenants and incubators). Further differences were observed in management of incubators/commercialization centers based in academia and elsewhere.
• Specific public policies might serve as an "incubator initiative", which fosters the development of clustered businesses in various economic branches (e.g. regional policy for alternative tourism supporting the development of new businesses or municipal intelligent energy program).
• Local economic development (LED) policy and value chain define the incubator mission. Critical success factor for quality performance of incubators initiated by LED is the interplay between the local government, local universities and local business champions.

Furthermore, the ECAbit network adopted the final version of its network constitution. According to Mr. Todor Yalamov, ECAbit network coordinator (ARC Fund Sofia, Bulgaria), the constitution governing membership as well as internal relationships is an important step towards the sustainability of the network. The network furthermore agreed on its action plan for 2010, that focuses on the continued joint development and implementation of network services and projects in sectors such as youth innovation, sector-focused incubation services in eco-tourism, the investment readiness of incubator clients, technology transfer and business match-making, and incubator benchmarking.

For more information about the conference, please visit the ECAbit website or get in contact with Mr. Todor Yalamov, ECAbit coordinator (todor.yalamov/at/online.bg).