Serbia Innovates Progress Report 1 Y3 January – March 2023

The activity recognizes Serbia's most promising domains of innovation and enables the formation of the first Serbian supercluster, a top-level innovation ecosystem and globally proven model providing a systematic approach to overcoming institutional, financial, and organizational barriers in the development of innovative solutions. The activity partners with financial institutions, the Serbian education system, business associations, and various service providers to create a support system for innovative business initiatives. The supercluster model represents an effective platform for promoting and enforcing innovation development, building innovation-friendly environments, and providing adequate institutional support and sufficient financing. The project addresses five growth obstacles directly affecting the knowledge economy in Serbia: low connectivity density and low collaboration among innovation and economy's key stakeholders, short innovation value chains, lack of cooperation between innovative and traditional companies, lack of cooperation between innovative companies and financial institutions, and lack of financing options for innovative companies in the early stage of development. To increase the chances of success, the project aims to utilize all capacities to overcome institutional, financial, and organizational gaps that currently prevent optimal innovation development in the traditional economy. The establishment of a supercluster will be achieved through the following sequential objectives: detecting the four most prominent domains, testing their potential in a real environment by conducting four separate supercluster pilots for chosen domains, selecting the most prominent domain and scaling it up, engaging additional stakeholders, creating a specialized venture capital fund, and promoting direct financing to support specific projects produced by the pilot and scaled-up supercluster. During the first quarter of 2023, the project team, together with all four pilot superclusters, continued to work toward their action plans and performed numerous important activities with impressive results in all strategic areas. The project team introduced "office hours" meetings with management team members of each pilot to provide adequate support, monitor progress, resolve potential issues, and challenges. The project team is intensively working with all four pilots on a weekly basis, planning and performing the remaining activities for the second half of the pilot year. The primary project focus during the first quarter remained on empowering supercluster activities across all marketing channels to realize their full potential. Each pilot showed immense capacity through various activities, bringing the project closer to different stakeholder groups and the general public. Throughout this period, each pilot launched significant educational programs that directly contributed to breakthroughs among students and first-time startup founders and introduced the project to new stakeholder groups. Talent development and education are integral parts of each pilot supercluster action plans. All pilots are working extensively in this field, and some of them have already marked impressive results. Supercluster Excellent 3, for example, launched the Web 3 Academy, a free training program for beginners in the Web3 industry. After a month of promotion and application, the pilot announced that they had 700 applications for the Web3 Academy, exceeding the expected result of 200 people trained to work in the Web3 and blockchain industry. The Web 3 Academy is a free training program for beginners in the Web3 industry, with more than 20 domestic blockchain experts imparting new knowledge and skills to the participants. Upon completion of the academy, all participants who fulfill their obligations will receive a certificate of participation, and the most outstanding participants will have the opportunity to present their new knowledge and skills at the final hackathon.