Cleantech Incubation Europe (CIE) focuses on supporting and stimulating entrepreneurs & SME's working in the field of clean technology (green, sustainable products, services and processes). The field of cleantech is new and many municipalities and cities try to formulate stronger and more effective policies around clean tech incubators. They notice it is not only necessary to set up an incubator, but also to have complementary policies to provide a positive business climate. CIE helps authorities to chose suitable policy interventions/instruments, attuned to their own local/regional situation. CIE is based on a partnership consisting of partners from Delft (lead partner), Helsinki, Budapest, London, Peterborough, Paris and Turin. The partners are cities/municipalities, universities and incubators (founded by the authorities). The universities and the incubators work on a daily basis with local/regional policy makers to support the clean tech SME’s with their business processes.Within the project these policy makers will attend the seminars as well and share their experiences, by which even more policy makers from the regions will be contributing. Project output will be five two day seminars in the different regions focused on sharing experiences by demonstrating the local/regional activities concerning clean tech incubation in the visited region and discussing bottlenecks and successful interventions. The programme of each seminar will contain two workshops: a returning workshop on best practices in the field of policy issues versus setting up Cleantech incubators and a dedicated workshop with a specific theme, chosen by the project partners.A best practices book 'Cleantech Incubation; Policy and Practices’ will be published, showing 15 established clean tech incubators. The project finalizes with a European conference 'Cleantech Incubation Policy and Practice'; where all results, experiences of the project will be showed and policymakers will be informed how to tackle clean tech incubation in their city or region. The project will be supported by a website 'Policy and Practice; Cleantech Incubation Europe', focused on all actors in the field of clean tech incubation (policymakers, incubators, knowledge institutes and industry). CIE will improve the knowledge of policymakers on how to tackle clean tech incubation and supporting SME’s in this field by their participation in the partner seminars. Achievements: The first Cleantech Incubation Europe –seminar was organized in Helsinki on 10 May 2012. The event was organized and hosted by Green Net Finland (P6) and City of Helsinki (P5). The seminar brought together an international audience of local policy makers, cleantech clusters, business incubators, cleantech companies and research institutions around Europe. In addition to the seminar and site visit, also a set of CIE consortium’s internal activities was organized during the event – Meet and greet –meeting, two workshops and a steering committee meeting. All together this kickoff event included programme during 9-11 May 2012. The aim of the event was to demonstrate the Helsinki local/regional activities concerning clean tech incubation, networking activities and innovation commercialization. The seminar had two subthemes: • Energy efficiency in urban environment • Commercializing cleantech innovations During the seminar the participants also visited an office building with the lowest energy consumption in Finland – Viikki Environment house. Completed in September 2011, the energy-efficient office building is used by the City of Helsinki Environment Centre and the University of Helsinki. 62 people registered for the event – 51 of them participated in the seminar and 29 joined the site visit in Viikki. The seminar organizing work and the event went according to project plan and no major problems encountered.