De expertgroep Cross-border (E)-commerce heeft dit jaar onderzoek gedaan naar de gevolgen van de COVID-19-pandemie voor de internationale e-commercemarkt. De wereldwijde economie kreeg een forse dreun te verwerken. Zijn er alleen maar verliezers in deze wereldwijde crisis, door velen betiteld als de grootste uitdaging sinds de Tweede Wereldoorlog? Nou nee, er zijn ook bedrijven die zich (deels) aan de misère hebben weten te onttrekken, onder andere door een focus op internationale e-commerce. De expertgroep maakte een aantal podcasts waarin verschillende internationaal opererende bedrijven en deskundigen ervaringen delen en toekomstvisies ontvouwen over de gevolgen van de pandemie voor de cross-border e-commercemarkt.
Like a marker pen on a map, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically highlighted the persisting existence of borders that used to play an ever decreasing role in people´s perception and behavior over the last decades. Yes, inner European borders are open in normal times. Yes, people, goods, services and ideas are crossing the border between Germany and the Netherlands freely. Yet we see that the border can turn into a barrier again quickly and effectively and it does so in many dimensions, some of them being not easily visible. Barriers hinder growth, development and exchange and in spite of our progress in creating a borderless Europe, borders still create barriers in many domains. Differing labor law, social security and tax systems, heterogeneous education models, small and big cultural differences, language barriers and more can impose severe limitations on people and businesses as they cross the border to travel, shop, work, hire, produce, buy, sell, study and research. Borders are of all times and will therefore always exist. But as they did so for a long time, huge opportunities can be found in overcoming the barriers they create. The border must not necessarily be a dividing line between two systems. It has the potential to become a center of growth and progress that build on joint efforts, cross-border cooperation, mutual learning and healthy competition. Developing this inherent potential of border regions asks for politics, businesses and research & education on both sides of the border to work together. The research group Cross-Border Business Development at Fontys University of Applied Science in Venlo conducts applied research on the impact of the national border on people and businesses in the Dutch-German border area. Students, employees, border commuters, entrepreneurs and employers all face opportunities as well as challenges due to the border. In collaboration with these stakeholders, the research chair aims to create knowledge and provide solutions towards a Dutch-German labor market, an innovative Dutch-German borderland and a futureproof Cross-Border economic ecosystem. This collection is not about the borderland in times of COVID-19. Giving meaning to the borderland is an ongoing process that started long before the pandemic and will continue far beyond. The links that have been established across the border and those that will in the future are multifaceted and so are the topics in this collection. Vincent Pijnenburg outlines a broader and introductory perspective on the dynamics in the Dutch-German borderland.. Carla Arts observes shopping behavior of cross-border consumers in the Euregion Rhine-Meuse-North. Jan Lucas explores the interdependencies of the Dutch and German economies. Jean Louis Steevensz presents a cross-border co-creation servitization project between a Dutch supplier and a German customer. Vincent Pijnenburg and Patrick Szillat analyze the exitence of clusters in the Dutch-German borderland. Christina Masch and Janina Ulrich provide research on students job search preferences with a focus on the cross-border labor market. Sonja Floto-Stammen and Natalia Naranjo-Guevara contribute a study of the market for insect-based food in Germany and the Netherlands. Niklas Meisel investigates the differences in the German and Dutch response to the Covid-19 crisis. Finally, Tolga Yildiz and Patrick Szillat show differences in product-orientation and customer-orientation between Dutch and German small and medium sized companies. This collection shows how rich and different the links across the border are and how manifold the perspectives and fields for a cross-border approach to regional development can be. This publication is as well an invitation. Grasping the opportunities that the border location entails requires cooperation across professional fields and scientific disciplines, between politics, business and researchers. It needs the contact with and the contribution of the people in the region. So do what we strive for with our cross-border research agenda: connect!
The Scandinavian e-commerce market is growing exponentially. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were all ranked in the top 10 of cross-border countries. This is an annual ranking of the best 16 European countries in cross-border online shopping by CBCommerce. These countries are thus of high interest for e-retailers to expand to. Furthermore, these countries are frontrunners leading the way for the rest of Europe in technology and sustainability. But what is important to know about these countries?
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Restoring rivers with an integrated approach that combines water safety, nature development and gravel mining remains a challenge. Also for the Grensmaas, the most southern trajectory of the Dutch main river Maas, that crosses the border with Belgium in the south of Limburg. The first plans (“Plan Ooievaar”) were already developed in the 1980s and were highly innovative and controversial, as they were based on the idea of using nature-based solutions combined with social-economic development. Severe floodings in 1993 and 1995 came as a shock and accelerated the process to implement the associated measures. To address the multifunctionality of the river, the Grensmaas consortium was set up by public and private parties (the largest public-private partnership ever formed in the Netherlands) to have an effective, scalable and socially accepted project. However, despite the shared long term vision and the further development of plans during the process it was hard to satisfy all the goals in the long run. While stakeholders agreed on the long-term goal, the path towards that goal remains disputed and depends on the perceived status quo and urgency of the problem. Moreover, internal and external pressures and disturbances like climate change or the economic crisis influenced perception and economic conditions of stakeholders differently. In this research we will identify relevant system-processes connected to the implementation of nature-based solutions through the lens of social-ecological resilience. This knowledge will be used to co-create management plans that effectively improve the long-term resilience of the Dutch main water systems.
The Dutch main water systems face pressing environmental, economic and societal challenges due to climatic changes and increased human pressure. There is a growing awareness that nature-based solutions (NBS) provide cost-effective solutions that simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help building resilience. In spite of being carefully designed and tested, many projects tend to fail along the way or never get implemented in the first place, wasting resources and undermining trust and confidence of practitioners in NBS. Why do so many projects lose momentum even after a proof of concept is delivered? Usually, failure can be attributed to a combination of eroding political will, societal opposition and economic uncertainties. While ecological and geological processes are often well understood, there is almost no understanding around societal and economic processes related to NBS. Therefore, there is an urgent need to carefully evaluate the societal, economic, and ecological impacts and to identify design principles fostering societal support and economic viability of NBS. We address these critical knowledge gaps in this research proposal, using the largest river restoration project of the Netherlands, the Border Meuse (Grensmaas), as a Living Lab. With a transdisciplinary consortium, stakeholders have a key role a recipient and provider of information, where the broader public is involved through citizen science. Our research is scientifically innovative by using mixed methods, combining novel qualitative methods (e.g. continuous participatory narrative inquiry) and quantitative methods (e.g. economic choice experiments to elicit tradeoffs and risk preferences, agent-based modeling). The ultimate aim is to create an integral learning environment (workbench) as a decision support tool for NBS. The workbench gathers data, prepares and verifies data sets, to help stakeholders (companies, government agencies, NGOs) to quantify impacts and visualize tradeoffs of decisions regarding NBS.
Tijdens het eindevent en in de eindrapportage van het Flow4nano project zijn verschillende onderdelen geïdentificeerd die voor de verdere duurzame doorwerking van de resultaten, en het vergroten van de impact, gewenst zouden zijn. Met deze Top-up willen de verkregen kennis door ontwikkelen en volledige datasets genereren die daarna gepubliceerd kunnen worden om zodoende het onderzoeksveld en bedrijfsleven te informeren over het gecontroleerd maken van nanodeeltjes in flow reactoren. Tevens willen wij door middel van het verwerken van de resultaten in het onderwijscurriculum ook toekomstige generaties studenten inlichten over de mogelijke toepassingen van de in Flow4nano gemaakte materialen. 1. Duurzame doorwerking naar de beroepspraktijk In Flow4nano hebben we twee belangrijke resultaten gehaald die nog niet volledig ingezet kunnen worden in de beroepspraktijk, omdat er nog wat meer onderzoek nodig is en incomplete datasets volledige disseminatie tegenhouden. a) We hebben een flow reactor ontwikkelt die twee vloeistofstromen kan mixen. Om er zeker van te kunnen zijn dat deze reactor ook goed geschikt is voor het maken van nanodeeltjes zijn we begonnen de mixing in deze flow reactor, onder invloed van nanodeeltjes in de vloeistofstromen, in kaart te brengen. De volgende stap hierin is deze dataset compleet te maken en deze te dissemineren naar stakeholders uit de beroepspraktijk via de lectoraatsnieuwsbrief en een poster op het jaarlijkse Nanotechnology crossing borders symposium (organisatoren: TNO/Brightlands Materials Center, Zuyd Hogeschool en Universiteit van Hasselt). b) We hebben kristallijne ZrO2 nanodeeltjes gemaakt. Zo hebben we kunnen aantonen dat onze flow reactoren niet alleen heel precies TiO2 nanodeeltjes kunnen maken, maar bredere inzetbaarheid hebben. Ook hier moeten we de dataset compleet maken en zullen we de resultaten dissemineren naar de beroepspraktijk via de lectoraatsnieuwsbrief en een poster. 2. Duurzame doorwerking naar het onderzoek De resultaten die behaald zullen worden tijdens het in de “duurzame doorwerking naar de beroepspraktijk” paragraaf beschreven onderzoek zijn ook zeer relevant voor het onderzoeksveld. Het is het doel om tijdens het Top-up project deze resultaten te dissemineren in twee open access artikelen, naast de disseminatie naar onderzoeksstakeholders door disseminatie via de lectoraatsnieuwsbrief en de poster. 3. Duurzame doorwerking naar het onderwijs In de laatste maanden van het Flow4nano Pro project is besloten om een nieuw vak aan het programma van de Material Science afstudeerrichting toe te voegen en zodoende het curriculum van de Applied Science studie te verbeteren. Dit vak zal ingaan op de energietoepassingen van materialen (in bijvoorbeeld zonnecellen) en het principe van de optische folies, zoals gemaakt in het Flow4nano project, past hier goed in. Binnen dit Top-up project willen we een set lesmateriaal voor dit vak ontwikkelen.
