Improving Regional Policies promoting and motivating non-technological Innovation in SMEs

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Innovation in SMEs is one of the big challenges of the European economy to compete in the global markets. Even if different policies and programmes have been put in place in different Regions to push SMEs in this line, the lack of motivation to innovate in SMEs has been identified by all the actors involved in the innovation system. And for the major part of the European SMEs, the non-technological innovations are the most important ones. How to deal with new business models, marketing strategies, commercialisation approaches, organisational issues, etc. In consequence, how to convince SMEs managers to use a part of their time to define and implement innovation policies becomes the key question to develop and adopt non-technological innovations in the companies. The objective of InnoMot project is to prepare the deployment of new policies and programmes addressed to support the adoption of non-technological innovations by SMEs in the Regions involved. The challenge of the project is to improve the development and adoption of new business models in SMEs by designing, implementing and managing strategies, policies and tools, whose aims are to improve non-technological innovation, and especially regarding the factors related with the motivation of SMEs’ owners and managers. Specific objectives will be: - to define a new approach on SMEs motivation - to develop and apply a methodology to identify, pack and transfer the better practices found - to identify a set of good practices - to define and design tools to motivate the promotion of innovation in SMEs, using the practices found - to facilitate the creation of platforms involving the different stakeholders to learn more about the deployment of new practices - to define Regional Implementation Plans - to improve among the regions the development of materials to push ahead the deployment of new policies' approaches - to disseminate the policies and results beyond the consortium The aim of the project is to build up expertise in the public administrations in order to improve the current practice regarding design, implementation and monitoring of Innovation motivation policies. The basis to reach the objectives is to identify the existing good practices, to analyse them identifying the key success factors, to establish the conditions to transfer them among the involved Regions, and to use them to improve the existing policies. In addition, a generalisation of this transfer system will be generated to help other Regions to apply it in the future. This path will be not linear but with a permanent feedback among the tasks to guarantee that the results, both intermediate and final will be adequate to the regional needs.

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