Researchers, coming from universities, laboratories or research centres, identify, prototype, adjust or develop technical or technological solutions in industrial value chains, sectors, specific or specialized topics.
At the same time, companies (SME, industries, …) identify technical, technological or organizational problems to overcome on the pathway of enhancing or directly putting on the market a new product, such as a good, a service or a solution. Let’s notice that identification and clarification of stakes linked to them are not necessarily obvious to formulate in order to search for a solution.
Two worlds, researchers and enterprises, that should in principle meet to mutually feed each other but that, too often, fail to do so due to a lack of opportunities for collaboration… Two worlds that, however, don’t necessarily have the opportunity to cross or meet.
The connection between researchers and entrepreneurs constitute therefore an important issue for regional innovation ecosystems.
The strategic objective of TRANSINNOV is to better structure and drive innovation ecosystems based on knowledge and technology that would lead to all types of innovation into SMEs.
The operational objectives are:
• Identification, in a limited set of European regions, of practices, experiences, pilot projects set up in order to enhance/amplify collaborations, networks and more widely spoken ecosystems of knowledge/technology transfer
• Sharing of these experiences and identification of enabling or blocking factors in order to design and implement better practices within participating agencies
• Dissemination and implementation of the results as widely as possible to start a learning process at the European level with a focus on knowledge transfer between more advanced region to other ones
In the project, the terms knowledge/technology are used thereby recognizing the role of knowledge as a whole (including humanities for example) in innovation such as services innovation or social innovation.
In the framework of TRANSINNOV, 4 European partners – 4 French, Bulgarian, Italian and Belgian (AEI) public agencies – that all target innovation and entrepreneurship support – have identified the same difficulties and the same stakes around this question. These same partners have co-designed an innovative methodology to facilitate the meeting of enterprises and researchers in sectors, chains, topics formerly identified. This methodological process is developed in a “workshop” format that we will call “Meeting in the technology cloud”.
The European project aims at designing (co-creation) and testing the methodology (prototyping) for the Meeting in the technology cloud (choosing thematic, interest participants, animate, … the workshop). After the test-phase that will be implemented by several innovation agencies involved in TRANSINNOV, in the context of their roles, missions, ecosystem and landscape (institutional, entrepreneurial, …), the methodology will be adjusted and then validated by the European project partners.
The process and the methodology, that will be proven and recognized at European level, present an obvious interest, on one side, for enterprise and research actors and, on the other side, for support organization, that will have an oriented animation/accompaniment/connection tool in the “users and technological solutions” perspective.
