Building up Availability of SME Internationalisation Services

Closed

The operational environment for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) evolves and becomes increasingly international at a quick pace. For example, the export, import, subcontracting, financing and marketing activities of enterprises are more and more often connected to international processes and actors and to their decision-making. It is a well-known fact that strengthening the competitiveness of an enterprise usually requires internationalisation. It is the duty of public business services to support SMEs in internationalisation. However, regional development or business service centres that reach vast amounts of companies are not sufficiently prepared to offer internationalisation services and the public actors lack the required resources for enterprise-specific counselling. Business advisors who work daily with SMEs do not have strong enough know-how on internationalisation. Data and analyses exist but there are no tools for distributing the information. The central objectives of the project are to identify ways of public business services to support SME internationalisation, develop the internationalisation services offered to SMEs, to improve the local availability of internationalisation services, to develop the cross-border cooperation and shared service processes of public business service centres, and to promote new business partnerships. The project targets its development procedures at public business service organisations, and thereby the project seeks extensive influence and attempts to guarantee the continuation when the project ends. The project is divided into five Work Packages (WPs): WP1 Management and Coordination, WP2 Information and Dissemination, WP3 Internationalisation training programme for business advisors, WP4 Development of regional and cross-border business service processes, WP5 Piloting SME internationalisation. The WPs have been designed in such a way that they support and complete each other. To reach its targets, the project will strengthen the business advisors’ internationalisation know-how and their ability to identify potential products and services international markets; develop organisational and regional operational models in a way that local actors are able to provide high-quality internationalisation services; identify enterprises interested in internationalisation, get them networking with each other; and identify new ways of activating SMEs in internationalisation. The results of the project include -a training programme and a portfolio (essential instructions and practical forms on internationalisation) for business advisors; -new methods and practices for providing and developing internationalisation services and for activating small enterprises in their internationalisation process; -a network of grass-root level contacts between partner organisations;and -new cross-border SME partnerships,import and export rings,B2B events arising from the pilot activities.

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