Innovation Strategic Initiatives Platform for SME ..
Innovation Strategic Initiatives Platform for SME in children's product industries
Start date: Nov 1, 2012,
In all European sectors, skills needed by workers and employers are changing rapidly due to diverse factors: technological change, global competition, ageing populations and evolving social structures. Furthermore, Europe foresees an increasing demand for a high-qualified and adaptable workforce and more skills-dependent jobs with a decline of the proportion of jobs requiring low levels of education attainment from 26.2% to 18.5%. Furthermore, it is agreed the important role SME play in creating more and better jobs in Europe. However, SME find it difficult to develop plans and initiatives on research and innovation which yields lower levels of product innovation and undermines competitiveness as a result.Children's product industry (eg. footwear, childcare, furniture, toys, textiles, etc.) suffers from above features even greatly due to additional factors like aggressive competition, price-pressure from low-labour cost, shifting of production sites, the low-skilled nature of most of their job roles or the fact that a vast number of enterprises are SMEs with limited resources. This project will put together organisations with expertise and knowledge in children's product industry to develop a platform that provides customized training on innovation strategy methodology and concepts for the acquirement of key competences on the matter as well as eases the development of innovation strategic initiatives by providing an adequate tool that will enable SME to define initial guidelines for innovation according to the specific characteristics of each company.Apart from the training material and the tool for the definition of innovation strategic initiatives, the platform will also include tutoring support to the learning process of key staff and two existing tools that will assist SME to assess themselves from an innovation standpoint:- AIJU Competitive Intelligence System with external key sectoral data.- IEP Innovation Management System for internal evaluation.
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