According to the Summary Innovation Index, which shows the results of the analysis of innovation performance in EU countries, the Partners of the Consortium, which are Poland, Bulgaria and Italy, fall into different performance groups: Poland and Italy are Moderate Innovators, and Bulgaria belongs to Modest Innovators. Both groups are below the EU average, what gives the project higher importance. The countries from those groups should act more actively towards continuous improvement of the innovation support programmes dedicated especially to SMEs. Small and medium enterprises create the majority of new jobs and are thus the backbone of the European economy. Following the objectives of European Union the regional and national agencies design and implement innovation support programmes but those, however, frequently do not satisfy the beneficiaries. The program formats delivered by innovation agencies very often need to be revised and sometimes a new scheme need to be introduced. The SMEs are companies from very different branches but there are some sectors where, at first glance, the perspective of transformation towards broadly understood innovations is not very promising. Here we are talking about traditional enterprises run in industries that have been operating on the market for several dozen, hundreds or even thousands of years.
The degree of their modernity and approach to the implementation of innovation often opposes modern industries related to broadly understood digitalisation and based mostly on the latest knowledge, such as IT, IoT, AI, AR, VR, drone industry, telemedicine or even hydroponics in favour of these others, of course. Although traditional companies definitely prevail on the market, the innovation support programmes often bring out highly advanced solutions dedicated to companies operating in the modern technologies industry or highly automated production companies. Although effective combinations of innovations with traditional services or products, such as thermoactivated clothing, on-line food stores, train simulators or foot scanners in shoe stores are already well known, entrepreneurs' willingness to develop towards new technologies is still small. The reason may be the lack of awareness of existing solutions and technological possibilities, and that is the reason for the stagnation, shrinkage and even the collapse of many SMEs in Europe.
Considering the fact of relevant barriers to innovation faced by traditional SMEs, partners of the consortium made up a decision to establish a project which main and specific goals are:
• Develop a strategy for promoting innovation in traditional business that could be implemented by business environment organisations and policy makers all over the Europe. The result will be based on the analysis of the problems encountered by traditional companies and on the identification and analysis of innovative solutions successfully developed by such companies from the countries represented by consortium members.
• Rising knowledge on technical, organizational or financial problems or commercial needs of traditional companies, to which modern solutions could be an answer.
• Rising knowledge on innovations successfully introduced in traditional companies.
• Creating new innovation support programme format dedicated to traditional companies and dissemination of new schemes among business environment organizations and policy makers in European Union.
