The overview of results point confirm that:
1. OI is a vital ingredient to enable an SME to grow– the project has found a critical mass of evidence proving the vital role that OI plays in the development of an SME. More importantly the project found evidence that OI is a necessary complement of SMEs’ creativity and an enabling factor for turning creativity into value generation.
2. An important condition for OI to generate valuable outcomes for an SME is for the OI partnerships and activities to be fully in line with the SME strategic objectives and challenges. SMEs are often driven by external factors to choose with whom they collaborate (typical examples a funding opportunity or the potential of a large corporation). This can lead them into a process of serving the strategic interests of the collaborating party rather than their own interests and overall into a situation of not enjoying their fair share of the generated outcome.
3. The OI process for an SME needs to be a flexibly adjusted process with partnerships and activities being adjusted as the SME moves from one stage of their innovation journey to another.
4. A key element for providing support to SMEs in order to engage in OI is the development of simple and user-friendly methodologies that can be easily and intuitively understood by SME managers.
The project has developed a range of activities which were intended to promote the INSPIRE project to a wider audience of innovation support players throughout the European Union by communicating and disseminating information about its objectives, activities and outcomes. To reach these goals, our dissemination plan identified the target groups, the messages to share, the media mix and gave specific information about the planned activities, the tools to be employed and the roles of the partners (see Deliverable 5.1: 1 Dissemination and Communication Plan).
By the end of the project, the project website had received over 4,200 visits and over 10,000 page views. A LinkedIn group on “Open Innovation in SMEs” was set up with the project partners recruiting members for the group and contributing posts on Open Innovation themes. On average 1-2 posts were published on a weekly basis and by the end of the project 298 OI experts had signed up to the LinkedIn group. As far as dissemination through Facebook was concerned, rather than creating a new group it was decided to join forces with the Open Innovation in SMEs group which is managed by Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke from ESADE. INSPIRE news was regularly re-posted to its 891 members, thereby making it a regular contributor. The consortium partners were all involved in disseminating information about the initiative and its outputs, either though presentations at conferences and workshops or through the distribution of printed materials or the presence of a roll-up at selected public events on the theme of innovation. Three INSPIRE case studies were selected by the Triple Helix Association for publication in a special booklet and subsequently diffused to over 2,750 subscribers.
The project has undertaken a considerable effort to engage with a number of innovation stakeholders and communicate to them the outcome of the project. The project organised six regional workshops, one in each of the six regions of Europe (Eastern Europe, France and Germany, Scandinavia, Small Developed Countries, Southern Europe and UK and Ireland) which involved a total of 210 innovation stakeholders. The consortium also organised events in the international ISPIM 2019 conference (
http://www.ispim.org(opens in new window)). This event gave the opportunity to the INSPIRE project to access 550 innovation experts from more than 50 countries with 150 participants engaging more actively with the INSPIRE offering.
