ETTBio addresses the challenging issue of still unused economic potential of research institutes and universities as source for innovation and therefore efficient regional economic development. ETTBio has a sectoral focus on biotechnology for the following reasons: 1) Biotechnology is considered a key sector (and key enabling technology) in Europe for the 21st century, 2) it has very specific characteristics, which have a significant impact on the successful design of the technology transfer process and 3) because of existing deficiencies of policies and lack of experiences. ETTBio aims to identify, exchange and communicate good practices about effectiveness of technology transfer in biotechnology in order to improve local and regional policies. The expected outcome of improved policies will be a higher number of new companies, creation of new jobs, higher tax income as well as an increase of the regional innovative capacity and economic performance.To have a heterogeneous level of experience, 10 partners from 7 regions were selected. Involved partners from UK and BE have extensive experience in the topic, DE and ES partners have intermediate experience and policy partners in PL, EE and CZ are just beginning to design policies for technology transfer in biotechnology. The project partnership includes regional and local authorities, research institutes and universities. This is considered the best possible combination for gathering all relevant information and transforming it to concrete policy actions. In EE & CZ, only regional authorities are involved because the regions recently started to focus on biotechnology. In UK and BE, the policy partners are involved during the entire project, but are not directly integrated as a partner because only little improvements of policies are expected. The partners provide a broad geographical coverage. This captures significant differences in the success of existing regional policy.Main activities are: 1) "Launch conference" to create a catalogue on benchmarking criteria for techn. transfer in biotechnology as output, 2) regional analysis phase to identify good practices (GP) with site visits in UK & BE, with 7 regional analysis reports as output, 3) selection of 3 GP per region & analysis as case studies (CS: in-depth elaboration of GP & suggestions how to further improve it). 4) CS exchange phase, where each region chooses 3 relevant CS accord. to identified regional challenges and adapts them to regional context with the aim of transferring the respective GP. 5) Based on the results, policy recommendations & implementation plans (IP) will be developed for each region 6) Overview of project results incl. IP will be presented to national & European policy makers as well as interested stakeholders in biotechnology at the "Closing conference" in BE. We will further provide general project communication media (incl. leaflets, a website, online newsletter). Achievements: To have a heterogeneous level of experience, 10 partners from 7 regions were selected. Involved partners from UK and BE have extensive experience in the topic, DE and ES partners have intermediate experience and policy partners in PL, EE and CZ are just beginning to design policies for technology transfer in biotechnology. The project partnership includes regional and local authorities, research institutes and universities. This is considered the best possible combination for gathering all relevant information and transforming it to concrete policy actions. In EE & CZ, only regional authorities are involved because the regions recently started to focus on biotechnology. In UK and BE, the policy partners are involved during the entire project, but are not directly integrated as a partner because only little improvements of policies are expected. The partners provide a broad geographical coverage. This captures significant differences in the success of existing regional policy. ETTBio will translate the best practices of effective technology transfer of biotechnology from well developed to low developed regions. In terms of Management and Coordination, all partners have submitted their partnership agreements. A steering comitee has been set up. A project management structure, a project handbook and the financial handbook have been developed and distributed among the project partners. In terms of communication and dissemination, partners have developed a project logo and started to prepare the ETTBio project brochure, newsletters and project website (www.ettbio.eu), which will be live soon. 1 press release in English and 10 according regional articles in local languages were disseminated to date. We have implemented skype as online communication tool. We use google-docs and dropbox to share documents. In terms of exchange of experience, the launch conference took place in Dresden on April 26th/27th, 2012, which was divided into internal part (attended by 20 people) and a public part incl. regional authorities and experts (80 people). The aim of the launch conference was to start preparing a catalogue on benchmarking criteria for technology transfer in biotechnology as output. Local meetings and phone conferences took place in order to coninue the preparation of the benchmark criteria catalogue as well as the according evaluation template, which will be the basis for regional analysis in the following period.