Learning to enhance exploitation potential of SME project results

ended

SMEs highly benefit from successful research that results in applicable solutions. It is either by monetizing their own innovative solutions or by cooperating with a research organization and bringing the shared results onto the market or other space for exploitation. In order to help this process by employing public funding and supporting activities, it is important to be able to detect and evaluate exploitation potential in research projects that are to receive the support. The partners of this project are public organizations supporting applied research by funding and assistance. They believe that in order to positively influence the research-driving SMEs and research-implementing SMEs, it is essential to be able to evaluate projects from the perspective of exploitation (or in other words application) potential. Specifically, it is key to be able to, first of all, select the most promising project proposals for support (the proposals with the highest exploitation potential) and, second, help them to successfully finish their projects and implement their results by interim and ex-post monitoring complemented with support services. Therefore, this project’s goal is to build a peer-learning group and share each other’s best practices and experiences and apply them in practice in order to improve project partners’ proposal-evaluation and project monitoring skills in terms of exploitation potential. This improvement could lead to higher success rate of the projects and their better impact assessment (Alves Ribeiro, 2015). Finally, the project also has a goal to disseminate its results among other research and innovation supporting organisations in Europe.