The objective of the proposal is to provide a new Enterprise Europe Network service to enhance the innovation management capacity of SMEs in Lombardy and in Emilia-Romagna. EEN partners in the two regions will deliver Key Account Mangement services to the beneficiaries of the SME Instrument of Horizon 2020 and will support particularly promising SMEs to improve their capacity to manage innovation processes. Therefore the new service will be provided to two target groups of companies: - Beneficiaries of the SME Instrument - SMEs with significant innovation activities and a high potential for internationalisation The new service will be incorporated into basic EEN services starting from 01/01/2015 and possibly further extended with the support of other partners of the future consortium.

StartInnShop intends to reshape, through the Twinning Advanced methodology, a set of services to support early stage innovative startups in developing the right products to enter and (most important) remain in the market. When accessing a support service dedicated to explore market opportunities, beneficiaries most often receive a complete theoretical support, but the majority of programs that are available now lack of practical experiences to allow entrepreneurs to really test their idea. By matching the Lean methodological approach with a concrete market gateway - the “NeoShop”, an innovation boutique providing soft commercial launch for innovative products - StartInnShop aims to design a modular kit of tools and services for accompanying innovative, knowledge-based and creative startups in testing, improving and selling their products. The consortium is composed by three Innovation Agencies: Aster (Italy)- the project coordinator, Laval Mayenne Technopole (France) and The Rubicon Centre (Ireland), which have already worked fruitfully together. This twinning action has a multiple goal: allow partners to carry on a peer review and assessment on their respective services; reshape and combine those linked to market development and set up permanent relations within the partnership, who already exchanged information on their best practices, with the aim of improving each partners’ services and internationalization perspectives. The final aim of the project is the drafting of a complete Design Option Paper, dedicated to analyse and describe all different scenarios in terms of background, soft and hard infrastructures, sector and stage of development in which the service could be implemented in order to facilitate its transfer and mainstreaming in the different EU contexts.

The objective of the proposed project is to create a Design Options Paper (DOP) for the implementation of a cross-sector innovation collaboration programme benefitting start-up SMEs in the cleantech sector. A twinning partnership between three partners of the Climate-KIC initiative in three different EU countries will be established. This partnership will execute peer learning of a model (Climate Innovation Exchange), which uses expertise from different sectors to improve the business support given to start-up SMEs to wishing to successfully enter low carbon innovations to the market. This will be achieved by the implementation of the Twinning Advanced methodology for the development of the Design Option Paper in order to facilitate the mutual learning between innovation agencies in a structured way. The best practice model – Climate Innovation Exchange - developed within the Climate-KIC Accelerator programme from the Climate-KIC UK will be transferred to the innovation agencies from Spain and Italy involved in the programme. The key driving forces for successful implementation of the programme in UK will be analysed, together with the transfer conditions, obstacles and possibilities concerning, in particular, the target groups for the programme and the process by which the programme operates. The practices developed with Accelerator programme in Spain and Italy will also be studied informing the design of even better practices for the SMEs support in UK. The core group of 6 peer-learners (2 from each innovation agency) will be established to observe transferred practices, analyse local conditions, create the strategy (DOP), provide peer-to-peer support for the implementation as well as draft deployment driven amendments to the DOP and execute dissemination of the results.

The objectives of TRANSINNOV are (i) Identification of practices, experiences, pilot projects set up in order to enhance/amplify collaborations, networks and more widely spoken ecosystems of knowledge/technology transfer, (ii) Sharing of these experiences and identification of enabling or blocking factors in order to design and implement better practices within participating agencies and (iii) Dissemination and implementation of the results as widely as possible to start a learning process at the European level. The partners of the consortium are AST (Wallonia-coordinator), BDI (Bretagne), ARC-Fund (Bulgaria) and ASTER (Emilia Romagna). They have complementary experience in structuring ecosytems such as animation of people’s network, set-up of technical platforms to share knowledge/technology and business opportunities, governing rules and involvement of end-users. Peer learning will be used to achieve the objectives. The peer learning process will include (i) collection of existing experiences within the partners, (ii) organisation of a two days meeting, (iii) writing of a first draft on the basis of collected information and experience, (iv) sharing of the content of this draft with local actors and SMEs, (v) organisation of a one day meeting to determine the content of the design options plan (DOP), (vi) writing of DOP and (vii) dissemination and support for implementation by other agencies. A technical platform will be used to facilitate exchanges all along the project. Improvement of knowledge transfer in a structured ecosystem should contribute to the “… creation of a favourable ecosystem for SME innovation in which public enterprises, SME intermediaries, …, end users, suppliers and enterprises … are encouraged to collaborate for radical innovation that may not yet be described and formulated as project” which is an axis of the H2020-INNOSUP call. The proposal will also follows the recommendations of the INNO-Partnering Forum for peer-learning process.