Within Europe’s economy, SMEs play a major role for employment and economic growth. Strengthening and maintaining the SMEs’ international competitiveness and innovation capacity therefore is of vital interest for Europe’s society. Increasing globalisation and rapid progress of emerging economies, boosted by digitalisation and well-developed transport logistics, put an increasing pressure on the economy in Europe. The requirements for sustainability and for a “greener economy” were intensifying this challenging situation. Defending their technological and market lead against new and ambitious competitors, requires European enterprises to adapt their business and innovation strategies and to constantly invest in innovating their products, processes, and services. This situation became extremely challenging in 2020-2021 by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall objective of the support action project was to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of investments (both private or public) in research, development, and innovation. Specifically, SMEs in the region of Bavaria had to be enabled to check and further develop their business and innovation strategy, and to perform innovation activities effective and efficient. Their ability to generate ideas, to select and translate the most promising ideas into projects, and to bring these projects to a long-term sustainable economic success had to be increased, as well as their ability to identify potential risks and to take suitable counter measures. This was achieved by the delivery of well-defined services packages to the SMEs, targeting: i) the enhancement of their innovation management capacity and the removal of potential innovation gaps and bottlenecks, ii) the planning and steering of their digital transformation, and iii) the integration of sustainability into their innovation and business strategy.
Start Ups and scaling up companies are currently changing the game in our region. The solid regional innovation support ecosystem allows young scientists to become entrepreneurs and try to create a real impact from their ideas, making them profitable. The European funding Program “European Innovation Council” is the only possibility to financially cover the whole innovation way. Specially targeted by the young companies is the funding instrument “EIC Accelerator”, which allow them the way to cover the valley of death between the prototyping and the commercialisation and overcome the critical phase of growing and scaling up the business model. All awarded companies accepted the Business Acceleration Services and the support of key account managers, as the perfect combination of financial and non-financial support for a sustainable growth.
