| abstract: |
Public innovation agencies strive at keeping the pace of SME innovation demand and traditional grant-based models remain the main source to fund research and innovation. However, public innovation agencies seek opportunities to implement supporting schemes pivoted on new approaches. Similarly, European policy makers at all levels experience a lack of robust evidence of the impact of both existing and new supporting models.
200SMEchallenge project will allow a selected set of innovation agencies to set up, implement and scientifically evaluate the impact and the effectiveness of a novel SME innovation support initiative; on the basis of the results, a complete Guide will be delivered and disseminated to make it possible to a larger set ot innovation agencies to take up the piloted scheme, and possible scale it up to other domains.
The piloted support initiative has the format of an Innovation Challenges (a.k.a. innovation prize). In particular, the proposed Challenge aims at impacting on SMEs awareness on the benefits of adopting design thinking and user-centric design validated practices (e.g. the Design Sprint) to the extent of validate market fit and technology requirements during the early stages of a new product development (NPD) process.
In order to meet such goals project partners will first build capacity to execute the Innovation Challenge, building on guidelines to be developed by an INNOSUP-05 H2020 project (INNOCHALLENGE), as well as from the know-how gathered during previous small scale pilots of the initiative. The experimental rollout of the novel scheme will be framed as the intervention action of an overarching RCT (Randomized Control Trial) study, which will overall involve 200 SMEs. By doing so, the project will deliver sound evidence of impact of the experimental initiative, and validate it as a new SME innovation policy tool.
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