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Good Practices in Regional Innovation
Introduction
A great number of measures currently exists to directly or indirectly support innovation in Europe, including measures supporting technology transfer, incubation and access to finance. The INNO-Policy TrendChart currently identifies more than 400 horizontal and specific measures in support of innovation. These measures play a key role to help organizations to innovate better and faster, by addressing specific market and system failures hindering European companies, and in particular SMEs, to fully exploit their innovation potential.
In order to accelerate the catch-up processes in Europe it is important that lessons are learnt from such measures, in particular as regards their effectiveness, i.e. how well the measures are adapted to the local targets and how they succeed in converting inputs into outputs.
Summary of project research
Staffordshire University has teamed up with six organisations across Europe in a successful bid for over £1 million of European Union funding. The project will research how well small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are supported in developing and implementing innovations in processes and products. GPRIX (Good Practices in Regional Innovation) - the purpose of the research is to identify the "X" factor that makes support programmes useful for SMEs.
The effectiveness of innovation support measures can be evaluated using the following two concepts; additionality and composition. Additionality refers to how much extra private innovation and Research and Development (R&D) will be performed resulting from public support, while composition refers to which R&D and innovation projects are stimulated.
Sectors being targeted are traditional sectors including the automotive, textiles, leather, ceramics, mechanical/metallurgy and food sectors. The GPrix project will assess a set of regional innovation support measures in a representative set of European regions characterized by a large number of SMEs from traditional sectors.
Project impact
This research will inform recommendations on best practice. The end result will be more effective and user-friendly support programmes for SMEs, and these should eventually benefit many firms in North Staffordshire.
Project partners
Overall Project lead: Pedro Soutinho, Inova, Portugal
Staffordshire University Staff Lead: Professor Geoff Pugh
g.t.pugh@staffs.ac.uk 01782 294092
Dr David Douglas, (Business School) d.j.douglas@staffs.ac.uk
01782 294190
Jon Fairburn (IESR) jon.fairburn@staffs.ac.uk
01782 294094
Amanda Hughes (Psychology) a.c.hughes@staffs.ac.uk
01782 295741
Dr Ian Jackson (Business School) i.jackson@staffs.ac.uk
01782 294211
Ian Wilson (Business School) i.a.wilson@staffs.ac.uk
01782 294185
Technical Support and website: Tom Ward t.ward@staffs.ac.uk
01782 294902
Other partners:
United Nations University MERIT, Netherlands Fraunhofer, Germany
ENEA, Italy
ESTER Technopole, France
University Polytechnic, Valencia, Spain
A Google map of the partners with links to their websites
Project timeline: The project started in December 2009 and will finish in December 2011.
This project is collaborating with two other EU projects MAPPER SME and RAPPORT
Project website www.gprix.eu
Centre for Applied Business Research www.staffs.ac.uk/cabr