"The overall objective of the EISS project was to collaboratively address a common innovation support challenge; namely to peer-review eco-innovation support programmes for SMEs in order to improve their environmental performance and energy efficiency as well as to transfer good practices into these programmes.
But to begin with, what is eco-innovation? According to the Eco-Innovation Observatory: ""Eco-innovation is the introduction of any new or significantly improved product (good or service), process, organisational change or marketing solution that reduces the use of natural resources (including materials, energy, water and land) and decreases the release of harmful substances across the whole life-cycle.""
The “eco-innovation support service for SMEs” theme has been identified by the project partners because -on the basis of their previous experiences working with SMEs-, it has a high potential for improvement at all involved partners’ territories (and in the whole Europe) in order to boost the local and international performance of SMEs and to support them to reach the EU 2020 goals. In the previous years, all three EISS partner agencies have been successfully participating in several national and international level EU funded projects, dealing with the elaboration of mid- and long-term strategies, specific policy recommendation papers concerning e.g. energy efficiency, green procurement, local actions on climate change impacts, biowaste in decentralized small-scale composting plants, funding schemes for innovation and sustainable development issues as well as designing and implementing regional level innovation support programmes for SMEs.
The basic EISS concept is to tackle the challenges that European SMEs face due to lack of their both technological (products and processes), and non-technological (organisational, marketing, institutional) eco-innovation capacities concerning environmental performance and energy efficiency.
The EISS consortium assumes that where eco-innovation support services exist, they tend to focus on cleantech or environmental technology companies. Moreover, these services are more frequently available on a national, rather than regional basis. Entrepreneurs’ eco-innovation capacities, both technological and non-technological, need to be developed because this will be a strong leverage towards Europe 2020 goals both in terms of sustainable development and competitiveness on the global market. Eco-innovation leads to reduced costs, improves the capacity to capture new growth opportunities and enhances brand reputation among customers.
Through the implementation of the EISS project and the tested pilot in its framework, great lessons were learned regarding eco-innovation and the significance of the provision of a self-assessment tool as the proposed 3EMT Tool has been more than proven. The specific tool is a useful weapon in two ways:
- First of all, it both during the EISS project pilot application in Greece and the previous application of it in Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary and Czech Republic (while also widely available in English), SMEs reported that the tool is of great importance as it showed them their position (benchmark) regarding energy efficiency in comparison to local and EU level competitors and in comparison with the whole market.
- Secondly, the tool (and any similar initiative) could be of high added value to similar innovation agencies, public authorities which design support programmes and policymakers. The tool can provide stats and data regarding the need for designing a support action/programme, while also provides a well-established reasoning for the design of long-term strategies regarding the issue.
As so, EISS partners suggest other innovation agencies to adopt the action, as its transferability has been also proven, through its easy and low-cost replication in another country."
