The services proposed within were based on EEN shared guidelines, manuals , trainings as well as participation in consortium, national an EU Working Groups, defining schemes to define common national advanced EEN innovation service packages, including SME Instrument beneficiaries dedicated actions &participating in SME Instrument national panel of expert.
The basic principles in the business innovation service support & coaching mission was to empower SMEs in their efforts toward successful implementation and subsequent commercialisation of their innovation. This goes hand in hand with strengthening the company’s capability to deal with the challenges of each stage of its life cycle including aspects such as strategy, organisation, management, financing and resource development. Thus a combination of EEN soft skills, common assessment tools (namely IMPROVE), together with Coaching schemes funded by EU ensured targeted SMEs to achieve significant results and impact.
A set of well-identified and committed companies was crucial to ensure the proper completion of the action. Hence, dedicated awareness raising campaigns and call for interests were launched to identified target groups.
As far as KAM target clients, their identification was possible only after the projects’ evaluations related to the cut off dates in the relevant 24 months period. After having received communication from EC related to the awarded SMEs, aspefic client attribution was made by the cooridnator to ensure smooth workflow and proper KAM activities.
Senior EEN experts were appointed as Innovation Experts, their main tasks were: implementing an Innovation Intake Check/Needs Analysis dedicated to potential candidates recruited via promotion activities and assessed upon specific criteria such as “strategic and international aspirations, opportunities to grow and capacity to innovate” (for both Type KAM &EIMC activities).
For KAM activities specific work performed was: helping SME instrument beneficiaries identify and source coaches, evaluating coaching service and capture the benefit to the company, identifying next steps to help the SME on its growth path; linking the SME to additional EEN support services available regionally or nationally; accompanying SMEs successfully through the Phases of the SME Instrument project and possibly succeed in Subsequent phases submission.
For EIMC activities specific work performed was: carrying out innovation management capacity assessments using IMP3ROVE methodology during one ore more face-to-face meetings with the company; analysing the assessment results and propose a jointly agreed action plan; delivering targeted and tailored support according to the action plan, empowering clients to undertake better innovation management and guide to growth; providing direct specific support or signpost to specific external expertise in commercial sector, networking, change management or project management.
The project was concluded with 83 started packages started among which 69 were regularly concluded.
EIMC services definitely represent the starting point of the client Journey. They lead to a better focus EEN offer and design new support actions aimed at enhancing SME growth. KAM services on the other side often represent one of the arrival points of the client journey as in-depth assistance offered through EEN and EIMC package led to successful SME Instrument proposals. KAM services represented then the base for other specific support actions such as access to venture capital funds, access to markets, to talents and infrastructures.
Totally, 7 ASOs were achieved thanks to ALPS INN3 activities. These results show an important impact on EEN performance.
