At EQAsce’s virtual 7th General Assembly on May 6th, 2021, members looked back on a successful 2020 despite numerous challenges due to the Corona pandemic. The Board of Directors and Supervisory Board highlighted that their strategy worked last year: since the beginning of the global Corona crisis and the increased financial threats to farms and value chains for meat, milk, and eggs due to animal diseases, they quickly took the right decisions. They reacted quickly and flexibly, enabled work at home, redesigned planned face-to-face events into webinars and online forums, and were able to maintain knowledge transfer and dialog in international networks via new communication channels.
“The crisis is seen as a booster for the Smart Service concepts developed years before and thus as a great opportunity for digitalization within the cooperative and its customers” says Dr. Achim Münster, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of EQAsce. That’s why the General Assembly also paved the way for EQA’s digital core business: The web-based organization of personal certification and the marketing of digital educational certificates for different target groups.
The Chair of the Board, Professor Brigitte Petersen, presented the most important steps in the strategic and operational planning for the success of the market launch of Digital Cards and the Blockchain secured credentials. This includes the launch of an online marketing campaign for the EQA Smart Service System starting in fall, for which the EQAsce office in Bonn is counting on the broad support of its members worldwide. The basis for this is the continuation of the close development cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institutes at the Bonn region and the rapid expansion of the EQA node in the DigiCerts certification network by the end of the year.
The new EQAsce members and cooperation partners who joined at the beginning of the year are proof that the business model of a European cooperative is considered future-proof across borders.
