Building competitive skills in SMEs
The Commission's Enterprise Directorate-General has recently published a report on 'Innovation management: building competitive skills in SMEs'. The book is the result of a study commissioned under the Innovation and SMEs programme, which is part of the EU's Fifth Framework Programme. The study analyses and describes a series of innovation management techniques (IMTs) currently being tested in SMEs by various national and regional organisations in several European countries, with the objective of validating their usefulness as innovation management tools. The book is divided into two parts. The first contains a description of ten selected methodologies, while the second part contains a brief summary of the 24 pilot projects selected by the European Commission on the design and implementation of schemes promoting selected IMTs. The book also contains a bibliography of the basic data for each IMTs project described. 'The selected IMTs summarised demonstrate that existing barriers can be dismantled and that this can be achieved by any organisation,' suggest the authors.