Are you a woman entrepreneur with a vision to transform the economy and protect our planet? The WE.Circular Innovation Contest is your opportunity to make an impact! 🌍✨

Organized by the WE.Circular project, co-funded by the Interreg Danube Programme, this initiative seeks to empower women entrepreneurs to drive economic growth and environmental sustainability across 12 Danube Region countries.

What’s in It for You?

🌟 Expert guidance to transform your business ideas into reality
🌟 Accelerated implementation of innovative circular solutions
🌟 International visibility and expanded networking opportunities

Who Can Apply?

Women entrepreneurs with small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that:
✅ Operate in one of the listed Danube Region countries – Austria, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
✅ Are officially registered for less than 5 years
✅ Demonstrate the application of circular models or technologies
✅ Have a female founder with at least 30% ownership

Why Join?

Selected finalists will:
✅ Participate in the WE.Circular Business Model Development Program, including workshops, market evaluations, and expert-led feedback sessions.
✅ Be featured in the “Women in WE.Circular” success stories, gaining international exposure.
✅ Have a chance to present their business models at the Pop-Up Store Event in Bratislava, Slovakia, with travel and accommodation covered.

Key Dates

📅 Deadline for Submission: February 16, 2025
📅 Finalists Announced: March 31, 2025

How to Apply

Submit your application via the dedicated online platform, OnePass, in English. Only complete applications submitted before the deadline will be considered.

💡 Don’t Miss Out! Take this chance to shape the future of the circular economy and be a part of a transformative network of women entrepreneurs.

👉 Apply now and learn more here: https://getonepass.eu/opportunities/WECircularInnovationContest/

Let’s innovate, excel, and succeed—together!

We regret to announce that economist Prof. Ing. Jiřina Jílková, CSc., departed from her great academic family on 21 June 2022. IREAS had the privilege to belong to that family for many years. She adopted many of us, showed us the way and supported us in major moments of our work and private lives. She knew how to motivate us, connect us in interesting ways, and dispatch us towards more independence at the key moment. We will never stop being grateful to her for that.

It was hard to earn her respect. Once you got it, though, you could be sure of her continuous support and, to a certain extent, even protection. That empowered us to enter shaky ground and ultimately led to better results and strengthening of the whole team.

As Svatopluk Čech wrote in his poem Dosti nás, “A low aimer will aim low”. Those who knew Jiřina understand that this was not her case. Throughout her life, she aimed high, showing the way for many of us, although it was sometimes difficult to follow that path. However, it was always a path forward, promising something new, original, often controversial, but always forward. Treading water, absence of a vision, or even reactionism irritated Jiřina.

Jiřina was uncomfortably frequently right. She was a visionary and was excellent at sizing up people, their qualities and limits. Her words often sounded improbable at first, sometimes everything spoke against them, but they came true sooner or later. All the same, she never had the urge to emphasize “I told you”, even if people around her would have deserved it.

She died suddenly during a business trip in Austria, doing what she did with enthusiasm all her life: educating a new generation of young, internationally successful people, many of whom now rank among important figures of scientific and social life.

Jiřina, we will all miss you much!

IREAS team

The IREAS team has successfully completed the cross-border Czech-Slovak project BESKYDY. Over the past years, we were working on the restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Beskydy forests, which are threatened by climate change. In the project, we investigated not only the perception of risks associated with climate change by local governments, residents, entrepreneurs and other organizations, but also the perception of individual benefits of forest stands. Based on these findings, we proposed the most appropriate adaptation measures and steps to mitigate the impacts of climate change. These actions were directed not only towards sustainable forest management and water management in forests, but also towards the support of biodiversity and ways to protect valuable natural sites. Designing institutional arrangements for cooperation among key actors was also an integral part of this. In the project, together with our partners from CzechGlob and NLZ Zvolen, we also developed a web-map application which, through interactive simulations, enables plotting expected climate development in the Beskydy area in the coming decades and its impacts on forests in this transboundary area. The application Beskydy Forests and Climate Change provides forecasts of future development of climate, biodiversity, forests and ecosystem services for the period 2020-2080. The application can also simulate the estimated impacts of climate change on species composition, carbon accumulation, biodiversity, aesthetic and economic value of the forest for four alternative ways of forest management and two different climate development scenarios considered.
The NLC colleagues also developed a pilot project for the transformation of the same-aged spruce forest to a different-aged quasi-natural forest at the Velký Polom project. The aim of the pilot project is to practically demonstrate the most progressive ways of forest adaptation to climate change. You can find more about the cross-border project funded by INTERREG V-A SK-CZ 2014-2020 on our project website at this link.