Concerning WP1, 20 KAM (evaluated/closed) were provided as technically planned, that is, the bottlenecks to the creation of economic impact in the companies’ beneficiaries of grants from H2020 were identified and used to select suitable coaches (51 KAM services were provided but not all were considered to the report, as at the report date 31 were not closed at the casetracker platform). The higher number of KAM services provided covering a wide range of activity sectors, was a relevant challenge, that have pushed the consortium to develop and maintain a strong collaborative work, based on systematic knowledge pooling and sharing.
In the context of WP 2, 53 companies were supported in Enhancing Management Capacity with a completed report evaluated, although 93 were provided with EIMC services (Fig.1). These SMEs were selected either during the previous programme (2014) or through the partners' skills and relations with stakeholders, specific national programmes aimed to support highly potential innovation companies, as well as through the registry of EEN-PORTUGAL clients.
EIMC service was provided according to an average 7-day service package proposed, and included all deliverables mentioned, like an innovation management capacity assessment, a need analysis and the provision of targeted services to address identified gaps. The assessment was based on the Innovation Scoring, that meets the definition of innovation management and the elements of an innovation management system as defined in the CEN/TS 16555-1.
The majority of the companies which are beneficiaries of the KAM services were located in the centre and south of Portugal. On the contrary, the major number of EIMC services were provided in North of the Portugal.
In a holistic approach to the service supported by the Innovation PT consortium, we can conclude that most of the sectors focused on the different calls in the last two years had the participation of Portuguese companies.
We can verify a slight deviation between the numbers of services proposed and carried out (Fig. 2), which can be justified mainly by the specificity of the KAM service, the need for signposting of these companies to EEN-PORTUGAL as well as the service of accompanying Seal of Excellence companies that require rigorous technical work and are, therefore, very time consuming.
