Europe INNOVA - Partnerships for better innovation support

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The ACHIEVE MORE project, 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 - Project Management and Coordination

WP2 - Development of ACHIEVE MORE ICT Partnership. The main objective of this workpackage was to build out the pan-European partnership, with 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 were also likely to be affiliated, to enlarge the reach of the better practice sharing, this may include working with organisations beyond the EU.

WP3 - Development of the "Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange". A central feature of the delivery mechanism of the Partnership was done through the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange (E&IX). The aim was to design a fit for purpose platform, process and programme, which facilitates 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.

WP4 - Delivery of the "Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange" This workpackage launched the E&IX alongside the UKBI Annual Conference where a substantial number of those who are professionally engaged with helping SME businesses to grow were assembled in Bristol in the UK. The programme introduced the ACHIEVE MORE partnership, and kicked off the process of exchange of better practice. The focus of communication over the E&IX actively reflected the interests and needs of the Partnership members. The E&IX had a multi-layered approach which enabled 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 were embarking on business support, particularly in the NMS, were 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 were the focus for the E&IX, which met physically three times during the project.

WP5 - Access to Finance. There has been a recognised gap in both early stage business funding, and particularly in funding services based innovation. This workpackage brought together a mix of public and private funding agencies, who  worked to develop new approaches, tools and models to valuing service industries and making the case for investing in them. This thinking and tools were shared not only across the partnership, but they wera also 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.

WP6 : Access to Clusters and European Networks. Cluster development has been an emerging competitiveness challenge for European countries, and ACHIEVE MORE has been in the fortunate position of being able to access and learn from the clustering networks funded under the first round of Europe INNOVA. The project has used the outputs from  privious 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 has been fed into the process and content that has been delivered via the E&IX.

WP7 - Communications. WP7 produced 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 has been used as a foundation, but a whole range of novel communication mechanism has also been designed and delivered, enabling partners to communicate on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis.  This bank of media will have a continuing and useful life after the project finished in 2011. This workpackage was also 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 had the ambition of capturing reaction to the findings and progress of the partnership's work.  A group of independent experts in the areas of incubation, clustering, business development and financing early stage innovation brought together several times to consider the functioning of  'extended 'system' of services innovation support. They made recommendations for policy intervention, which have and will be of great use both to the Commission and to the Europe INNOVA KIS horizontal steering group.