For Work Package 1: Key Account Management (KAM) for the beneficiaries of the SME Instrument, Berlin Partner and ZAB allocated their experts who had already undergone formal training for the tools proposed in the work programme.
Upon provision by EASME 31 SME Instrument beneficiaries were assigned to our consortium, 25 to Berlin and 6 to Brandenburg. 17 cases are related to SME Instrument Phase 1 and 14 cases to SME Instrument Phase 2. Key Account Manager in both organisation emailed each individual company to introduce the KAM service. The SMEs were introduced to the service and the experts highlighted the benefits of coaching, scheduling an initial meeting with management team of each beneficiary. The experts visited the mentioned companies and explained the process in more detail to the management team as well as providing an introduction how the SME needs analysis will be carried out and that this will be a departure point to facilitate the identification of the best coach. Once the needs analysis were carried out, the expert discussed its output with the client and used it to search the Coaching Database and then selected potential best match coaches.
Regarding to some of our clients that went through this process in early 2015, both the expert and the management team agreed that due to each respective company’s specific needs, none of the coaches present in the database were suitable. For these cases, the KAM actively searched for potential coaches outside the Coaching Database and presented options to the company. A coach was then selected by each company and the KAM proceed by supporting the coach with registration on the database, contract with EASME and liaison with the company. The process of the coach selection was improved in 2016 after full implementation of CaseTracker. During the whole process the KAM worked alongside the beneficiary to monitor and measure progress, maintain a good level of the beneficiary-coach relationship, capture the dresults and report them and when suitable promote them through a dissemination phase in internal and external communication channels.
Worked package 2 has been used by the project partners to help particularly promising SME to enhance their innovation management capacities. During the reporting period this service was offered to 26 companies in Berlin and to 13 companies in Brandenburg. The beneficiaries of these services were SMEs with existing, significant innovation activities and which have a high potential for internationalisation.
