Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MERLIN (Methodologies for Researcher Led INnovations)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2018-12-01 do 2020-02-29
Within Europe, SMEs have long been recognised as the Union’s growth engines accounting for 57% of value added and two-thirds of employment. Start-ups (or young SMEs) are particularly good job creators with an average of 12 jobs created by European start-ups and young SMEs acting as the greatest net job creators within the private sector. Thus, there can be no doubt that the fostering and growth of SMEs has the greatest impact socially and economically on the well-being of the single market.
MERLIN project will support market-oriented researchers, SMEs and start-ups across Europe to consider the full potential of their research and to shape ideas and outputs into innovations to be ready for market validation and commercialisation. In the context of Startup Europe initiative, the concrete objectives of MERLIN are to (i) stimulate a greater interest from researchers to view the results of their work as potential opportunities to be exploited with the correct business model; (ii) accelerate and foster the grow of new ventures by equipping researchers better to work with effective models for the successful commercialization/bringing to market of their R+D activities; and (iii) introduce the European entrepreneurship ecosystem and the financial opportunities it offers to create and help new ventures. This will increase productivity, improve private investment in further researchers, create more global innovations, and stimulate a greater interest from researchers to consider the results of their work as potential opportunities for commercialisation.
Besides these core activities, we have developed the content for 8 thematic workshops; created 32 digital contents, including videos and podcasts interviewing project participants and business experts; and actively participated in 27 events / fairs, with a booth for project participants, a presentation of MERLIN and its activities, as guest speakers or with a panel. All the content (slides, videos, podcasts, etc.) are stored and publicly available at MERLIN storage on Zenodo. MERLIN also developed the 'Growth Radar' online application, to help researcher find programmes in Europe that can support their current needs in terms of partners, finance or other needs, based on 6 criteria: Idea Stage, Technology Maturity, Market Maturity, Financials, Amount of funds received, and Team size.
Participants who attended MERLIN activities reported that they had created a total of 23 SMEs, filed 15 patents, 19 participants secured funding (private or public), 28 participants had setup licence agreements and partnership with other SMEs/corporates. 53 of them have entered other entrepreneurship programmes to continue improving their business skills.
Exploitation and sustainability of the project results is guaranteed thanks to partners' current and future activities and projects. Content, lessons learnt and network of contact will be used by all MERLIN partners.
Regarding dissemination activities, we want to highlight the following ones:
- Active presence of MERLIN at large entrepreneurship and innovation fairs: South Summit, Startup Olé, Foro Transfiere, Wolves Summit, Women in Tech Summit, InnoShare.
- Conferences: Digital Day, ICT Vienna, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Infoshare, ICT Proposers' Day.
- ""Innovation Radar breakfast"" at the Euro Parliament, on January 2020. The working breakfast was hosted by the Vice-Chair of the Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committee of the EP, the MEP Lina Galvez Muñoz.
- Interview in regional TV of Poznan (Poland) and Polish Nation Radio in morning show.
- 4 Articles published in “Emprendedores”, a Spanish magazine about entrepreneurship."
The main outcomes and lessons learnt from the performance of the ‘Customer discovery’ process and the organization of the activities, which may help to define better strategies for future programmes, are:
- Researchers genuinely want to increase the impact of their research but not at the cost of their focus. Researchers will rarely become entrepreneurs.
- Training in specific methodologies will not result in researchers creating companies but will support their creation of concepts for commercialists to pick up on
- People working at Tech Transfer Offices struggle to identify the potential in their own organisations and are treated as other by researchers
Regarding the synergies with the EFSI and ESIF instruments, incubation and acceleration programmes along with early-stage grants provide the best investments to support researchers, start-ups and SMEs in the commercialisation of research results. MERLIN participants were, in general, at a very early stage to benefit from VC or larger scale public grants or loans.
On the long term, Society will benefit from the change of mindset in the Research community, since the new Digital Economy needs to integrate innovative research results as quickly as possible, in order to create companies that contribute to augmenting job creation and GDP in Europe.