Due to the unexpected late approval of the contract and the delay in the publication of the SME Instrument beneficiaries, several consortium members had to face some problems to achieve the initial targets. Furthermore, the Network partners suffered difficulties to access to the IMP3rove training and its licenses.
Once the contracts were signed and the beneficiaries of the SME Instrument Phase 1 were published, the consortium assigned KAMs for each company. These KAMs contacted the companies in order to provide KAM services. A total of 5 companies have received the KAM support services in phase 1 of the SME Instrument.
On the innovation management capacities side, the consortium partners evaluated different alternatives to the use of IMP3rove. IMP3rove is an excellent tool but the consortium members realised that it was not the most adequate one for the local companies, since IMP3rove focuses in medium-big size SMEs with well defined internal structures. The regional companies, smaller than this, were a bit out of the scope of the IMP3rove approach. The consortium partners performed a search in order to provide a better service to the local SMEs and finally focused on the Innovation Health Check. This tool, developed by Enterprise Ireland, provides a similar service but requires lower administrative paperwork for the company. Thanks to this approach, the companies get interested in participating in this exercise.
The consortium partners were trained by Enterprise Ireland staff and started the collaboration with them in order to use this tool with the local SMEs and share the results for better future benchmarking. A total of 17 companies have received EIMC support services for the elaboration of action plans, of which 15 have been able to implement several actions (according to their available resources) of their action plans.
