The Danube Alliance sprang to life to strengthen the competitiveness of SMEs in the Danube region with a goal to increase the resilience of the supply chains. The project of Priority Area 8 of the European Danube Region strategy (EUSDR), which ran from 2021 to 2022, offered intelligent services and sustainable supply chains development activities based on the experience and knowledge from other Danube projects, namely GoDanuBio and DanuBioValNet.
The Alliance was formed as a response to the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic situation, which revealed the economy’s weak points. Global value chains were shown to be vulnerable in extreme situations, not being able to function effectively when the suppliers were compromised due to the pandemic lockdowns, geopolitical conflicts, extreme weather, and other events.
Value chain disruptions are now very commonplace due to current and recent events, and they seem to be getting worse. Therefore, active risk management for value chains is essential. Value chains should not grow organically, but should be actively managed. This is why the Danube Alliance focuses on understanding, analysing and resilience promotion of selected value chains in the Danube region (Bioeconomy as pilot application area) to support SMEs’ inclusion into more sustainable and resilient value chains. These goals shall be achieved by using a multi-method approach, based on a 3-steps to safeguard supply chains.