Europe INNOVA - Partnerships for better innovation support

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The ACHIEVE MORE project will be delivered through 8 workpackages, focused around assembling and delivering a Public Private partnership that can work together to deliver better business incubation and clustering for ICT SME, enabling them to raise finance more successfully and get to the market quicker.

WP1 - deals with Project Management and Coordination and continues throughout the project

WP2 - Development of ACHIEVE MORE ICT Partnership. The main objective of this workpackage is to build out the pan-European partnership, it is envisaged that it will have a core of 50 leading European business and technology incubators, 15 ICT Cluster organisations, 5-6 funding agencies with direct access to up to 400 KIS-ventures with high-growth potential across the EU. Associate members are also likely to be affiliated, to enlarge the reach of the better practice sharing, this may include working with organisations beyond the EU. The target is to have the partnership in place by Month 9 of the project

WP3 - Development of the "Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange".

A central feature of the delivery mechanism of the Partnership will be done through the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange (E&IX). The aim is to design a fit for purpose platform, process and programme, which will facilitate swift and timely exchange of better practice between all members of the partnership, both those who are on the leading edge of business support and cluster building and those who aspire to join them. This work will take place between month 4-9 of the project

WP4 - Delivery of the "Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange"

This workpackage is planning to launch the E&IX in Month 10, alongside the UKBI Annual Conference where a substantial number of those who are professionally engaged with helping SME businesses to grow are assembled in Bristol in the UK. The programme will introduce the ACHIEVE MORE partnership, and will kick off the process of exchange of better practice. The focus of communication over the E&IX will actively reflect the interests and needs of the Partnership members. We anticipate it will have a multi-layered approach to enable advanced thinking to be done in a shared knowledge place amongst leaders in business support, but for that knowledge to be shared through a variety of mechanisms to a wider audience of Partners and Associates. Similarly the needs of those who are embarking on business support, particularly in the NMS, will be fed up to the leading grouping for them to be able to develop thinking and action that can be shared and applied. Tools, Tips and Techniques that deliver will be the focus for the E&IX, which will meet physically three times during the project.

WP5 - Access to Finance

There is a recognised gap in both early stage business funding, and particularly in funding services based innovation. This workpackage will bring together a mix of public and private funding agencies, who will work to develop new approaches, tools and models to valuing service industries and making the case for investing in them. This thinking and tools will be shared not only across the partnership, but will also be promoted widely across the finance and regional support funding community in the EU and beyond, as a means of encouraging them to engage with this challenging topic. This workpackage is expected to run during the 2nd and 3rd year of the project

Work package 6 : Access to Clusters and European Networks

Cluster development is an emerging competitiveness challenge for European countries, and ACHIEVE MORE is in the fortunate position of being able to access and learn from the clustering networks funded under the first round of INNOVA. We will use the outputs from these networks, and other global cluster development research, to identify excellent practices and tools that appear to deliver tangible benefits to such ICT focused clusters, and to individual SME's development. This understanding will then be fed into the process and content that will be delivered via the E&IX. This workpackage will do most of its work during the first 9 months of the project, but will also hold a watching brief for cluster building developments.

WP7 - Communications

WP7 will produce a variety of multimedia and interactive outputs which can be used by the Incubator partners and their ICT Knowledge Intensive Services enterprises, to permit them to raise their understanding of what constitutes better practice, to build or fine tune their business support processes, and to acquire finance and revenue from business partners with greater efficiency. A library of mixed format entrepreneurial and incubation content has already been established in the prior ACHIEVE project, and this will be used as a foundation, but a whole range of novel communication mechanism will also be designed and delivered, enabling partners to communicate on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis. It is expected that this bank of media will have a continuing and useful life after the project finished in 2011. This workpackage will also be responsible for providing news about the project to the INNOVA platform and providing also a channel by which people can view the multimedia content in a wider context through the projects video server.

WP8 - Policy Impact Evaluation

This workpackage has the ambition of capturing reaction to the findings and progress of the partnership's work. It is anticipated that a grouping of independent experts in the areas of incubation, clustering, business development and financing early stage innovation will be brought together several times to consider the functioning of this extended 'system' of services innovation support. They will then be able to make recommendations for policy intervention, which will be of great use both to the Commission and to the INNOVA KIS horizontal steering group, who will have an overview across the whole range of KIS projects.