Project description
Peer learning for achieving enhanced SME project exploitation potential
The EU-funded LEEP-SME project aims to make public funding more effective by increasing the chances of excellent research projects that involve SMEs to get funded and successfully bring up innovative exploitable solutions. Specifically, the objective is to improve European research funding organisations' (RFOs) ability to recognise and work with exploitation potential in proposals and running projects in order to lead them to generate applicable results. In other words, this project aims to enhance the proposal evaluation and project monitoring procedures and support services of European RFOs working with SMEs. To do this, the project built a peer learning group that will share best practices and experiences and apply them in real life.
Objective
SMEs highly benefit from successful research that results in applicable solutions. It is either by monetizing their own innovative solutions or by cooperating with a research organization and bringing the shared results onto the market or other space for exploitation. In order to help this process by employing public funding and supporting activities, it is important to be able to detect and evaluate exploitation potential in research projects that are to receive the support.
The partners of this project are public organizations supporting applied research by funding and assistance. They believe that in order to positively influence the research-driving SMEs and research-implementing SMEs, it is essential to be able to evaluate projects from the perspective of exploitation (or in other words application) potential. Specifically, it is key to be able to, first of all, select the most promising project proposals for support (the proposals with the highest exploitation potential) and, second, help them to successfully finish their projects and implement their results by interim and ex-post monitoring complemented with support services.
Therefore, this project’s goal is to build a peer-learning group and share each other’s best practices and experiences and apply them in practice in order to improve project partners’ proposal-evaluation and project monitoring skills in terms of exploitation potential. This improvement could lead to higher success rate of the projects and their better impact assessment (Alves Ribeiro, 2015). Finally, the project also has a goal to disseminate its results among other research and innovation supporting organisations in Europe.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
160 00 Praha
Czechia