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Invest in Innovation
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Sep 30, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

In the context of rapid globalization and the re-balancing of the world economy, EU recognizes that innovation is essential to ensure the continuing ability of Europe’s businesses to compete in the marketplace. European Commission expects to create an Innovation Union by increasing investment in knowledge, promoting better funding for innovation and effective use of resources. Although in theory the importance of innovation for competitiveness and business growth is very clear and stated in several documents, in practice the processes of innovation development and management are successfully implemented in some large enterprises and only very few SME's are involved in the process. Those SMEs that are un-tapping their innovation capacity and focus on issues beyond creating and using technology, create breakthroughs in areas ranging from basic business planning and marketing to new product introduction, organisational development, financing and 'soft technologies'. The main objective of In2In project is to facilitate more effective provision of collective business and innovation support services for SMEs, so as to ensure the increase of innovation within the SME’s. It will attempt to become a tool that will support the growth of innovation within SME’s and it will be focused to SMEs staffs that need to know the basics of a successful innovation practice. In order to achieve the above it has been created a well-balanced consortium of 6 actors with complementary mix of skills and knowledge: work and training/education involved in skills, Innovation, e-learning, quality and dissemination and of course strong project management experiences: - Grafia has been helping enterprises in developing competences, skills and creative and innovation potential in their human resources for 21 years. - Learning Light has worked with a number of businesses to improve their performance by introducing new innovative technologies including e-learning and other technologies designed to support learning and development. - Asset Technology is a know-how transfer enterprise with extensive experience in implementing transnational projects, while offering a vast variety of services focused on and off the job training - Consorzio abn focusses on existing social business models and designs and implements researches and interventions that allow SMEs to innovate their social business. - EOLAS has easy and direct access to the target public on regional and national level for the needs analysis and piloting phases of the project and extensive expertise at quality and exploitation. - Synthesis offers training aiming to inspire and empower participants. It gives special attention to learning for personal growth and view life-long learning as a natural element of a person's life and has proved experience in dissemination activities. The main results of the project are three guides focused on SME staff along with a social and collaborative learning platform and accompanied e-courses. The three areas are a) Innovation - Creativity Generator at the work place, creativity enhancing SMEs and more in detail micro-enterprises and finally Knowledge Management for Innovation which will help SME owners/ decision makers and staff to identify key knowledge in their company. To ensure a common understanding is achieved by the consortium and in order to meet the aims and objectives, the Project Management Methodology has been built around the principles relating to the European Quality Assurance Reference Framework (EQARF) for VET constituted of fours axis: 1. Planning: Provide the most up-to-date information to the way innovation can be boosted within SMEs through creativity and knowledge management 2. Implementation through the creation of guides for 3 Innovation Modules and an online platform to support the diffusion of the Innovation models through further e-learning opportunities 3. Assessment & Evaluation via piloting testing on SMEs employees 4. Feedback based on project findings, for future work in the field which will help to improve SMEs staff way of thinking and operating at the working environment. The outputs of the project will increase the competences of EU SMEs staff and introduce them to innovation thinking and innovation boosting. It is expected skills building on SME staff, acquired capacity to analysis, problem solving, decision making, technical skills and increased offering of services in the area of building innovation potential in micro SMEs. Additionally, cultivating within local societies innovative way of thinking and exploitation of a model to inspire experienced SME owners to support young initiative (intergenerational approach) and the development of new policies focused on promotion of SME innovation.
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