PARTICIPANTS STRUCTURE 

Altogether 188 researchers registered for the event, out of theme 148 were invited to join the B2Match platform and 104 accepted the invitation and joined the platform. Registrations came from 30 countries from ERA and beyond and almost half of researchers registered in the first step of registration lived in the country other than country of their origin. 

Figure 1: Number of registered researcher

On the other hand, 38 organisations, most of them small and medium enterprises, registered for the event. Companies from 20 countries were represented: most of them from Spain (7), France (5), Belgium (3) and Italy (3). Germany, Ireland and Switzerland were each represented by two companies. Companies from Albania, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Malta, Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom were represented by 1 company.

Figure 2: Structure of registered companies by type

The following table summarises the participants registered to B2Match and participation in life sessions and 1:1 meetings. Altogether 168 participants registered in the B2Match platform including researchers, company representatives, invited speakers and organisers. The information about the 1:1 component is also included. Although the participants were offered with an additional possibility to schedule the meetings after the end of the live event, majority of one-to-one meetings took place within its framework.

Table 1: Participants in the B2Match live sessions

PARTICIPANTS FEEDBACK

32 event participants filled in the feedback questionnaire. Out for them 65,6 % were researchers. 15,6% company representatives and 15,6 were participants who contributed to the event as invited speakers. The rest were representatives of partners involved in the organisation of the event.

Majority of participants (N = 19) indicated that the event met their expectations to certain extent. Expectations of 12 participants were fully met and only one indicated that their expectations weren´t met.

Participants had an opportunity to explain why their expectations were not met or only met partially: the most common explanations were, that they would welcome more participants, or participants more relevant for their specific field. Also, some researchers experienced that not all employers were open for one-to-one meetings or they rejected some of the received meeting requests.

Participants were also in general satisfied with the information provided by the organiser prior to the event with over 40 % (N=13) of respondents rating it as excellent and 56% (N=18) as good.

Participants were also asked how they liked the specific components of the event programme. For all components of the event the feedback was mostly positive with majority of respondent evaluating them as excellent or good.

Figure 3: Evaluation of sessions

When asked whether they would participate in the similar event again, more than 80% (N=26) of participants responded that they would participate, the rest (N=6) chose the answer “maybe”.