The EU faces huge challenges in food security, sustainable agriculture, marine and maritime and inland water management. Blue Growth solutions can play an important role in meeting these challenges and unlock the potential of oceans and inland water for the benefit of European competitiveness. Blue Growth is identified as a key emerging industry to be supported via inter cluster collaboration as well as a key driver for the EU economy. NEPTUNE aims at developing new cross-sectoral and cross-border industrial value-chains, including notably SMEs, to foster the development of Blue Growth industries in Europe and beyond. This will be based on the construction or reconfiguration of value chains driven by the integration of new technologies and know-how between Water, Aerospace, ICT and Agriculture industries. NETPUNE addresses in particular three key aspects of Blue Growth that have a great potential to benefit from such collaboration and SME innovation support: (i) Water management in urban and rural environments; (ii) Fluvial and maritime transport and port logisitics; (iii) Environment and renewable marine energy. From a methodological perspective, NEPTUNE focuses on two main concepts: the innovative Open Space Platform that refers to the collaborative space and innovation animation techniques via a project emergence methodology that helps SMEs and other stakeholders to identify market trends and opportunities and support the incubation of Blue Growth projects and innovation ideas. NEPTUNE expects to support at least 100 SMEs for the development of 40 new innovative solutions. NEPTUNE brings together 10 of Europe’s leading clusters from 7 countries and 2 additional innovation, creativity and inter-cluster expert organisations to implement this ambitious project.

The project involves 3 partners of the Enterprise Europe Network South West France consortium which covers the region Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the Midi-Pyrénées territory. The general objective is to contribute to raise the competitiveness of SMEs from this area by offering support services in the area of innovation management. The project will also contribute to develop more efficient and more effective innovation processes and higher quality innovation management capacity assessment and support services. The support will be delivered as service packages to 2 groups of SMEs: a) Beneficiaries of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument, Fast Track to Innovation and Future Emerging Technologies Open: to enhance the probability of a successful exploitation of the innovation project results and lead to the sustainable growth of the beneficiary beyond the participation in Horizon 2020. The support service will pinpoint weaknesses in the innovation capacities of the beneficiary, select suitable coaches to address the identified weaknesses and monitor the coach-client relationship and to accompany the beneficiary through the SME instrument project b) SMEs with significant innovation activities and a high potential for internationalisation: to enhance their innovation management capacities to be able to gain new international markets and leaderships. The support service will consist in an in-depth innovation assessment in order to develop and implement a tailored action plan to improve the SMEs capacity to manage innovation processes. The partners will use dedicated assessment tools: IMP3rove, Check’Innov and Innovation Way. The project will last 12 months and will provide 63 support service packages.

Raising the competitiveness of SMEs from South West France by offering services linked to innovation management. The project involves 3 partners of the Enterprise Europe Network South West France consortium which covers the region Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the Midi-Pyrénées territory. The general objective is to contribute to raise the competitiveness of SMEs from this area by offering support services in the area of innovation management. The project will also contribute to develop more efficient and more effective innovation processes and higher quality innovation management capacity assessment and support services. The support will be delivered as service packages to 2 groups of SMEs: a) Beneficiaries of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument phase 2, Fast Track to Innovation and Future Emerging Technologies Open: to enhance the probability of a successful exploitation of the innovation project results and lead to the sustainable growth of the beneficiary beyond the participation in Horizon 2020. The support service will pinpoint weaknesses in the innovation capacities of the beneficiary, select suitable coaches to address the identified weaknesses and monitor the coach-client relationship and to accompany the beneficiary through their European project. b) SMEs with significant innovation activities and a high potential for internationalisation: to enhance their innovation management capacities to be able to gain new international markets and leaderships. The support service will consist in an in-depth innovation assessment in order to develop and implement a tailored action plan to improve the SMEs capacity to manage innovation processes. The partners will use dedicated assessment tools: IMP3rove, Check’Innov, Innovation Way and CCI MAP. The project will last 24 months and will provide 109 support service packages.

The FUNDCELERATOR project will aim at developing a new fund raising support methodology targeting innovative and high-growth potential SMEs operating in markets characterized by long time-to-market paths (typically more than 3 years, such as in biotech, medical devices, materials, cleantech, aeronautics, etc.). Based on their respective experience, knowledge and already developed fund raising support tools and methodologies, the 4 involved innovation support organizations will make use of the “Twinning advanced” methodological approach to collaboratively build and test an improved fund raising acceleration support programme dedicated to the target group SMEs, relying also, in a systemic mode, on all the existing fund raising support services provided by other regional private or public stakeholders. As part of the project, the regional innovation support agency from Aquitaine (ADI, France), the Baden-Württemberg regional innovation and business support organization (BWCON, Germany), the Dublin Business & Innovation Centre (DUBLIN BIC, Ireland) and the regional business and innovation incubator from Murcia (CEEIM, Spain) will experiment the new enhanced fund raising support methodology and evaluate its performance and impacts on beneficiaries (adequacy to their needs, service quality and efficiency) while beginning to apply and to test the new approach with 8 to 10 SMEs (at least 2 per partner). As a result, the new improved fund raising support methodology will be documented in a Design Option Paper (DOP), as a guide to be disseminated into other innovation support organisations, helping them at implementing the new designed programme, providing them recommendations, returns on experience and performance results.

The project involves five partners of the Enterprise Europe Network South West France consortium which covers four regions (Aquitaine, Limousin, Midi-Pyrénées and Poitou-Charentes). The general objective is to contribute to raise the competitiveness of SMEs from the 4 regions by offering support services in the area of innovation management. The project will also contribute to develop more efficient and more effective innovation processes and higher quality innovation management capacity assessment and support services. The support will be delivered as service packages of 7 days to 2 groups of SMEs: a) Beneficiaries of the SME Instrument of Horizon 2020: to enhance the probability of a successful exploitation of the innovation project results and lead to the sustainable growth of the beneficiary beyond the participation in Horizon 2020. The support service will pinpoint weaknesses in the innovation capacities of the beneficiary, select suitable coaches to address the identified weaknesses and monitor the coach-client relationship and to accompany the beneficiary through the SME instrument project b) SMEs with significant innovation activities and a high potential for internationalisation: to enhance their innovation management capacities to be able to gain new international markets and leaderships. The support service will consist in an in-depth innovation assessment in order to develop and implement a tailored action plan to improve the SMEs capacity to manage innovation processes. The partners will use a dedicated assessment tool: IMP3rove. The project will last 6 months and will provide 24 support service packages.