Effective public sector action is a cornerstone of spatially balanced and sustainable development in the Baltic Sea Region. Especially rural areas need administrative support for compensating lower economic potentials for the benefit of their population. ASAP created innovative solutions to meet the most urgent challenges for rural development in the Baltic Sea Region in an integrated way: Demographic change leads to a new composition of the rural population. Knowledge society calls for well-educated people and knowledge-based businesses. ASAP helped public and private service providers to adapt to new demands, and universities to become partners for developing rural areas. Achievements: The project initiated an international exchange of experience on a very broad and “unusual” combination of subjects. This enabled the project partners to find new connections between topics. The project specifically focussed on synergies between administrative reforms, the utilisation of ICT for service provision, strategies to meet the demographic change and actions for promoting university-region interaction. Based on the international exchange, the project implemented 23 pilot actions in the participating regions as model solutions and new best practices transferable for similar activities in other regions around the Baltic Sea.The ASAP handbook “Rethinking rural development” provides a comprehensive overview on the main project results. It presents concrete strategies in the fields of knowledge management, reorganising citizen services and intelligent use of ICT/eGovernment tools and further ideas for development strategies for rural areas in the future. Furthermore, it delivers concrete recommendations to local and regional authorities in rural areas to make them pro-active agents that are capable of comprehensive approaches and achieving a fruitful interaction of the national, regional and local level for the benefit of rural areas.