Twin City Hub in 2025 at a Glance

On the path to a competitive and prosperous region, it is important to assess the reality first. In 2025, Twin City Hub visited the Basque Region (Spain), Øresund Region (Denmark–Sweden) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam–Eindhoven–Delft) to benchmark against top European innovation hubs. We gained valuable insights into innovation governance, campus-driven high-tech ecosystems, venture-building & scale-up models, industry–academia-research collaboration, as well as quantum tech & advanced manufacturing ecosystems. Post-trip brainstorming workshops helped us distill relevant insights into a whitepaper. We completed our Bratislava-Vienna innovation ecosystem exploratory mission recently as part of innovation strategy recommendations development for the manufacturing sector in the Slovak-Austrian cross-border corridor.

Pilot activities launched @ Twin City Hub

Piloting, benchmarking, and continuous learning are essential to advancing our project. By launching a cross-border startup incubation call and programme for hardware startups—focused on scaling from prototype to production, mentoring, and hands-on experience at manufacturing sites—we took the first step toward building a sustainable SK–AT manufacturing incubation pipeline.

Under the Industry Meets Makers platform, we also initiated a cross-border open innovation pilot that activated corporate–startup matchmaking across Slovak-Austrian borders. This effort brought together institutions, corporations, SMEs, startups, universities, students, and hobby innovators in meaningful co-creation and solution development. This marks the foundation of a scalable open innovation model for the Twin City region.

In parallel, we began knowledge transfer between Austria and Slovakia with a focus on data, AI, and change management. The “City as a LEGO” training prototype was successfully tested and will be further refined. This represents the first step toward launching pilot initiatives in education and talent development within the scope of the Twin City Hub project.