INPRO project intend to contribute to the qualitative improvement of SMEs knowledge on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) by improving the support that is available to them, functioning as a think-tank that identifies tests and prepares new directions within IPR innovation support.
The sector chosen to test a first line service was the Cultural Creative Industries (CCIs). This sector is increasingly at the intersection of art and technology where innovation is often a collective process that involves many heterogeneous actors whose objectives and needs differ. Those actors often combine different types of IP rights, including copyright, patents and trademarks.
During two dedicated two-days’ Peer Learning Workshops, PPs have compared their “case studies” and IPR services, discussed on how to improve services to be delivered to companies and how to adapt them to the specific sector. The Peer learning activity let partners learn from the best and share good and bad practices in IPR support services delivery. The peer-learning meetings were also preparatory for the drafting of the Design Options Paper.
The realized Design Options Paper is a “guide” or a “handbook” for other innovation agencies and other institutions in designing and implementing support programmes and services enhancing SMEs to exploit the full potential of IPR for their business and to provide similar and/or more focused IPR support services, in particular with reference to “IP First Line support service”.
Thanks to the exchange of knowledge among PPS and analysis carried out on EU Best Practice on IP support services and on the strengths and weaknesses of every PPs’ initiatives, was designed a newly developed first-line support on IP and IPR matters dedicated in particular to Creative Industries in the housing domain.
Such newly developed 1st-line assistance on IP for the CIs sector has been designed to offer companies a wide range of services to improve their knowledge of IP topics, raising their awareness of the opportunity deriving from a proper protection of IP rights, as well to improve the quality of services to be delivered by Innovation companies.
Moreover, the partners implemented a pilot action in order to test the service designed with SMEs and professionals working in the CCIs from the project partners' regions. The aim was to deliver a pilot action to verify with SMEs the consistency and assess the effectiveness of the services proposed with company needs. By this way, companies of each region had the opportunity to know more about the initiative
Each Partner selected up to 5 beneficiaries (including companies of CI sector, professionals, researchers)in their region, for a total of 15 that took part to the Pilot Action.
In order to exploit and disseminate the results, activities performed by the partners were presented through different means as partners’ newsletters, websites, seminars, one-to-one meetings with pilot action beneficiaries
The final version of the DOP was made available to relevant stakeholders on Project Leaders website and presented with seminars also at Eu Level (Brusselles – 10th Oct. 2017).
In addition, a MoU has been signed between Project partners at the end of the project to engage in more frequent peer learning activities.
