Networking Innovation Room for Added Value Networking Alliances

Project Information

NIR-VANA

Grant agreement ID: 681787

DOI

10.3030/681787

Project closed

EC signature date 18 April 2016

Start date 1 May 2016

End date 30 June 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 788 997,42

EU contribution

€ 788 997,42

Coordinated by

FRIEDRICH-SCHILLER-UNIVERSITÄT JENA
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NIR-VANA (Networking Innovation Room for Added Value Networking Alliances)

Reporting period: 2017-09-01 to 2018-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

SMEs rarely have the equipment, facilities, skills, resources and exploitation networks to achieve high levels of innovation independently. Instead, the majority of successfully innovating SMEs collaborate to achieve their aims. This may be with other SMEs, large enterprises, research institutes or universities, often by employing Open Innovation principles. Open Innovation (OI) is an innovation strategy by which companies go beyond their internal boundaries when designing and developing Innovation projects. Failure to collaborate is a major barrier to SME growth through innovation.

NIR-VANA provides an opportunity for EEN and innovation advisors to improve the capacity for online innovation of SMEs. The project focused on the following objectives:
Help innovation advisors enrich their current activities for the benefit of SMEs with online tools that automate many of the time-consuming elements of their role
Promote the acquisition of new skills for the innovation advisors to use current online platforms and to guide the SMEs throughout the online collaboration process for innovation
Engage the SMEs into the EEN added value services for enhanced and open innovation support.
Facilitate accurate reporting of EEN activities to the European Commission
Involve SMEs from both innovative and non-traditionally innovative sectors into the innovation loop to increase their integration within the European Innovation Network.

The key goal of the project NIR-VANA is to develop an ICT-based layer that will facilitate the work of the innovation agents and will also promote a change of mentality of the SMEs. Some services will be provided online using a new Networking and Innovation Room (NIR) where the innovation agents and the SMEs interact to facilitate partnerships. These services will allow direct and ongoing support provided by the innovation agents to the SMEs, links to other external services (orchestration logic), increased efficiency for the management and monitoring of the collaboration, and services aimed at encouraging SME’s involvement. One key aspect of these services is, that they provide a process for building new partnerships and collaborating. This process should greatly benefit SMEs as well as innovation advisors and agencies.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Right at the beginning of the project a literature review and survey of innovation agencies and SMEs was conducted. The consortium reached the number of valid responses corresponding to the SME survey in the 286 responses collected from 8 countries. One-to-one interviews were carried out among 35 innovation advisors in 7 countries (mostly EEN) to understand their current role as innovation advisors and identify barriers and enablers for OI, as well as training needs.

In the next step we created a Workflow Element Library with more than 50 different workflow elements for innovation processes and more than 60 mock-ups of innovation processes developed. The wizard for customizing case-specific open innovation workflows was developed. In the workflow the innovation advisor can support SMEs during the different phases of the innovation process according to the EU Standard CEN/TS 16555, establishing different types of collaboration (starting from idea generation to commercial exploitation).

A toolbox was created with questionnaires, checklists, analytic techniques, etc. to be used by the innovation advisors in the steps or phases of the innovation workflows. Sources for useful templates for innovation advisors and SMEs (e.g. the European IPR helpdesk) were also integrated.

EEN has been integrated in several manners:
1) the workflow for partner search implemented in the Partner Search Room;
2) the connection to EasyPP to create and submit profiles to the EEN Partnership Opportunity Database;
3) scrapping of EOIs from Merlin;
4) EEN nodes listed on a map together with the registered advisors:
5) Indicators and ASOs are reported (either automatically or manually).

We created the Networking Innovation Room (NIR) services which contain all the different added value tools and systems to be integrated and use on the layer. NIR is integrated on the current innovation platforms to create synergies in order to boost the innovation loop along the value chain. The current version of the platfrom is accessible using: https://platform.nir-vana.eu. An API has been developed to enable the registration of users and creation on rooms (e.g. NIR) in NIR-VANA from external platforms.

Part of the training activity of NIR-VANA has been based on face-to-face training sessions in support of the pilots. Training was based on practical activities, walking advisors through the functionality of a service and the skills they need to exploit it. Total number of 285 trained IAs.The training platform: http://nirvana.salleurl.edu.

Additionally we organised several on-house trainings (about 200 participants) and webinars (about 50 participants) as well as sent out additional newsletters and made strong NIR-VANA platform and social networks based communication.

We finished the pilot validation and attracted over 700 users and they realised the following interactions on the platform:

+1000 Interactions with other tools
+6000 Collaboration Spaces
+2000 Working Rooms
+2000 Networking Innovation Rooms
+2000 Partner Search Rooms Created (Merlin, EasyPP...)

Regarding the final communication results we realised the following:

1 re-designed NIR-VANA project webpage
1 new NIR-VANA landing page
NEW!!! NIR-VANA Corporate Image
NEW!!! Corporate NIR-VANA Presentation
Updated NIR-VANA SlideShare Account including presentations
5 NIR-VANA own events with + 400 participants
22000 people received our Newsletter
Collaborating! NIR-VANA participates in international conferences
10 In-house NIR-VANA Trainings with +200 participants
10 NIR-VANA thematic Webinars
NEW!!! NIR-VANA Youtube channel
800 Tweets
+35 Posts on Linkedin
+20 New Linkedin members
45 blogposts

We are actively disseminating and promoting all project results on the websites: http://project.nir-vana.eu https://platform.nir-vana.eu/ and www.nir-vana.eu.

NIR-VANA Twitter account https://twitter.com/nir_vanaproject
A LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12016631
Blog posts on our website

Regarding the exploitation

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

NIR-VANA will designed, developed and validated new services assisting online collaboration for innovation in order to help SMEs to access a broader range of potential innovation partners and mobilise them in a timely manner for concrete projects.

The project designed a new service to be provided by innovation advisors, that will help innovation advisors to provide new added value services by using online systems that will facilitate functions like partner finding, referrals, workflows, monitoring and others in order to promote the successful development of innovation partnerships among the SMEs.

After a positive feedback recieved by EASME and the EEN partners we are working further on the deployment of NIR-VANA as the tool to cover the needs of EEN Innovation advisors and their clients.

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