The overall objective is to improve growth and innovation of European active medical device SMEs by identifying and assisting in removing the barriers to their innovation and growth, and then by providing relevant tools, services and networks. An important element is the dissemination of knowledge on the requirements of investors, so business development can be focused on communicating compelling and relevant investment opportunities, and accelerating the transition from research to revenue.

In the first stage, existing areas of business innovation and financing will be identified and categorized, including an evaluation of growth potential, and requirement for tools, guidelines, services and types of adequate financing. Areas of potential innovation will be analysed and correlated to types of investment and growth barriers. Lessons learned will be discussed at Round Table meetings, and policy recommendations presented at a final public event. The partners in the consortium have been carefully selected to represent a broad spectrum of professional knowledge relevant to this particular sector. They provide a rich resource of contacts and networks in the medical devices field. They are knowledgeable about each other's core competencies and areas of excellence, through working on national projects and/or from the PAXIS and the Gate2Growth initiative.

The partners, with geographic locations ranging from Scandinavia to Greece and from France to the Baltic, are skilled in delivering high impact, high response solutions based on in-depth knowledge of R&D activity and the challenging situations of many SMEs in the medical devices area. A full range of dissemination techniques, tested in many initiatives, both public and private, will be deployed to assure maximum awareness, use and exploitation of the findings and outputs from this valuable project.