GPRIX - Good Practices in Innovation Support Measures for SMEs

The GPrix project will provide a comprehensive insight into the design and implementation of SME research and innovation support programmes, actions, services and networks especially at national and regional level, and on its impact, in particular amongst the traditional sectors SMEs that represent the vast majority of companies in Europe.

The GPrix consortium will carry out an in-depth analysis of R&D&I support measures and their impact in SMEs and on their transaction towards a knowledge economy, focusing on seven

European regions, namely on the North and Central regions of Portugal, Limousin in France, Emilia-Romagna in Italy, West Midlands in the UK, Comunidad Valenciana in Spain, North Brabant in The Netherlands, Flanders in Belgium and Saxony-Anhalt in Germany.

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 main objective of the GPrix project is to identify good practices in innovation support measures to SMEs from the traditional sectors in seven European regions by developing a methodological framework for collecting internationally comparable data on existing Research and Innovation support programmes/measures in the public sector. This data will then be used to create a variety of indicators that can help to take conclusions and provide recommendations for improving the design and implementation of research and innovation programmes supported by the public sector directed towards traditional industries.

The project will develop a set of recommendations aiming to make a contribution to the future policies focusing the SMEs, namely on the design of the innovation support programmes/measures focusing on the following 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.