Project description
New SME support scheme focused on social innovation
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99 % of all business in the EU. They receive public support in their innovation efforts to better avoid failures and increase their capabilities. The role of innovation support schemes is instrumental. This is mainly geared towards market-oriented innovation. The market potential of social innovation is not well known and acceptance remains low. The EU-funded DepoSIt project aims to reverse this trend. It will develop an improved innovation support scheme that focuses both on economic and social aspects. The project will apply a randomised control trial (RCT) method that will be deployed in six EU countries to test the concept on more than 60 SMEs.
Objective
In order to help SMEs to fully realise their potentials and overcome market failures specific to them, public support to innovation in SMEs is available with a wide range of instruments and support services. At this point, innovation support agencies play a substantial role as intermediates for SME innovation by designing and delivering the innovation support programmes. However, despite the recent strong engagements and delivery of diverse innovation support schemes, addressing different innovation challenges, innovation support agencies still lack in a provision of evidence-based results which will demonstrate effectives of these newly developed schemes. Strengthening innovation management capacities in SMEs is defined as one of priorities of the future agenda for creating market-oriented innovation, but on the other hand, market potential of Social Innovation seems to become in the focus in the past year. Yet this kind of innovation is not well known and acceptance seems to be still low. With an aim of addressing these key challenges - creating an evidence-based innovation support scheme and comprising two central aspects (economic and social), DepoSIt Project objectives to develop a significantly improved innovation support scheme - Innovation Audit tool for Social Innovation and test it in a real environment conditions. By the application of Randomised Control Trial (RCT) method, six DepoSIt Project partners from six EU countries, active and experienced in design and delivery of innovation support programmes, will test the scheme by engaging min. 60 SMEs and in this way examine its effectives. Successful experimentation results will lead to the scheme validation and its upscaling. Furthermore, the Project aims to serve as a best practice example in this way to stimulate and deploy additional innovation agencies (min. 18) to become more effective and efficient in design, delivery and especially in experimentation of designed innovation support schemes.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
70599 Stuttgart
Germany