The growing evidence supporting the presence of climate change, and it’s devastating consequences, is increasing the urgency for a global shift towards a more resilient, resource efficient, low carbon economy. The SMEs sector accounts for more than half of the private sector added value making it a significant resource in the transition towards the global adoption of a systemic low carbon approach. Evidence suggests there is growing interest in ‘low carbon’ innovation and uptake can be significantly increased by supporting SMEs to promote adaptation and mitigation innovation across multiple market sectors. This, in turn, will drive forward the low carbon economy and create jobs.
Supporting the development of cleantech innovation with multi-sector relevance, and connecting these innovators to market consumers is therefore an important part of encouraging market growth. This however is a complex challenge and requires a robust response model.
Innovation Agencies are uniquely positioned to collaborate and share knowledge across the innovation agency community, providing the potential to enhance support for start-ups to reach knew markets, whilst also identifying best practice. The strategic objective of the TWINN project is to facilitate this peer-learning between innovation agencies. Through a detailed evaluation of existing best practice and context based case studies a Design Options Paper (DOP) has been produced to share the learning from this project and provide guidance on effective peer-learning.
The DOP demonstrates how innovation agencies can share knowledge and collaborate to develop a flexible best practise model. It demonstrates how cleantech start-ups, in particular, value this multi-sector approach, and to meet national carbon reduction targets these agencies need to understand how their activities interact with whole system thinking. It therefore acts as a guide for innovation agencies wishing to establish new market opportunities for cleantech start-ups. To this end it presents Engaging cross Sector Market Exchanges (EngagingSMEs), as a replicable multi-sector added value workshop, designed to be integrated in to a wider cleantech start-up support programme.
