IDRA

Project: “Small Medium Enterprises Innovation Capacity Boost” funded by IPA 2014”

Year: Aug 2020 – Nov 2020

Project background: This project aims to reduce the innovations gap in the region by combining joint efforts of the partners in equalizing the misbalances between EU and IPA countries and leverage on them to boost innovations in SMEs on transnational level though enabling factors and innovations cauterization. The relevance of the project to the challenges in the program area results from the general outputs and new solutions from the project, namely:

• Sustainable and insightful government statistics regarding key enabling factors for SME innovations, customized from implemented information needs analysis of the SMEs – new statistical survey that will provide information to public and private sector to reduce the innovation gap.
• Free, easily accessible Self-assessment tool for benchmarking SMEs standing in the BM entrepreneurial ecosystem in the relevant sector – building knowledge and understanding with SMEs management on the importance of innovations and provision of relevant tools to benchmark and take necessary steps to boost innovation or attract external innovation
• Recommender cluster system for proposing of innovation transnational clusters that will facilitate the easier and more qualitative proof-of-concept and innovation development – a tool that facilitates networking and transfer of know-how and supports the defragmentation of markets in the Balkan-Med region.

The project goes beyond existing practices with the recommended transnational innovation clusters, building on the data from statistical survey and SAT.

Based on the results of the survey on the Innovation of the SME in Albania and the results of the SAT, as well as information on the national level for the innovation of SMEs, the contractor will prepare reports to describe in section 4.2 “Specific work” to reach the overall outputs of the SMEInno Boost project.

Specific Objective: Preparation of the Manual of the Successful Innovator – a booklet in the local language and in English summarizing the main findings in the report adapted for the use of SMEs, based on the benchmarking report prepared by IDRA); Preparation of the Innovation Action Plan to be customized and provide to a sample of 10 SMEs (10 SMEs in Albania are to be covered).

Results: To be prepared and developed a Manual of the Successful Innovator in the local language (Albanian) and in English summarizing the main findings from the matching record analyses from SAT and SMEI results in the report adapted for the use of SMEs. This manual for the application of the SAT will be developed and should provide at least insights of best practices of similar assessment tools, experiences and advice from the best performing Innovators of the country. In order to produce a country representative manual, the contractor has to ensure the alignment with the National Innovation Strategy document.

The Innovation Action Plan should provide a strategy and guidelines how SMEs target group can benefit from the increased ability to develop/attract innovations and funding and boosted capacity. This action plan will provide know-how, best practices, experiences and advices from this target group and for the whole population SMEs in ICT sector in Albania.