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Supported by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)

Contract no. 245459

News


European SME Week, 15-21 October 2012

This campaign promotes enterprise across Europe and is taking place in 37 countries, so events and activities – national, regional or local – will be as close as possible to existing and potential entrepreneurs. >> More...

Events


Final Workshop – 'Impact of innovation support measures in SMEs of traditional sectors: Results of GPrix project', 28 February 2012, ENEA, Brussels, Belgium

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About the project

What will the project do?

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.

Why is this important?

A great number of measures currently exist 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 are the measures adapted to the local targets and how do they succeed in converting inputs into outputs.

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.

Which sectors are being targeted?

Traditional sectors including the automotive, textiles, leather, ceramics, mechanical/metallurgy and food sectors. For comparative purposes, these are the sectors that will be targeted in the seven regions to be addressed by the project.

Project timeline

The project started in December 2009 and will finish in December 2011.

This project is collaborating with two other EU projects MAPEER SME and RAPPORT.