Establishing in-depth services enhancing the innovation management capacity of South West of France SMEs in 2017-2018

ended

The project involves 3 partners of the Enterprise Europe Network South West France consortium which covers the Aquitaine/Limousin/Poitou-Charentes region and the Midi-Pyrénées territory. The general objective is to contribute to raise the competitiveness of SMEs from this area by offering support services in the area of innovation management. The project will also contribute to develop more efficient and more effective innovation processes and higher quality innovation management capacity assessment and support services. The support will be delivered as service packages of 7 days to 2 groups of SMEs: a) Beneficiaries of the SME Instrument of Horizon 2020: to enhance the probability of a successful exploitation of the innovation project results and lead to the sustainable growth of the beneficiary beyond the participation in Horizon 2020. The support service will pinpoint weaknesses in the innovation capacities of the beneficiary, select suitable coaches to address the identified weaknesses and monitor the coach-client relationship and to accompany the beneficiary through the SME instrument project b) SMEs with significant innovation activities and a high potential for internationalisation: to enhance their innovation management capacities to be able to gain new international markets and leaderships. The support service will consist in an in-depth innovation assessment in order to develop and implement a tailored action plan to improve the SMEs capacity to manage innovation processes. The partners will use dedicated assessment tools: IMP3rove and Check’Innov. The project will last 24 months and will provide 84 support service packages.