The European Innovation Platform for Knowledge Intensive Services (KIS-IP)

Submitted by Administrator on 5 March, 2010 - 13:12

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Rationale

Innovation in services is a main driver for future competitiveness in Europe. However, it seems that Europe lacks leading edge innovations in services, which would stimulate a great number of fast growing enterprises with an international flavour. This may be explained by the fact that investments made in R&D and innovation in services are rather low in comparison with manufacturing. Furthermore, it often seems difficult to bring new business models to the market, due to the lack of entrepreneurial experience and market complexities. Despite the great potential of services for growth and innovation, only few innovation support measures explicitly address the needs of the service sector in general and of fast growing enterprises in particular. This calls for a reorientation of innovation support measures towards services.

Following an open call for proposals in 2007, the KIS-IP was established in February 2008 under Europe INNOVA. The KIS-IP addresses the specific needs of innovative service companies in specific sectors through sectoral partnerships and horizontal activities. It brings together publ ic and private partners from different countries willing to cooperate in developing new forms of support for innovation, taking into account the specific needs of service companies "born global". This requires not only the design and testing of new service packages but also of new forms of service delivery which are specifically tailored to the strong market orientation of service companies. Traditional innovation support mechanisms are often biased towards technological innovation in manufacturing. The KIS -IP accepts the challenge of changing this.

In the first phase, the KIS -IP included ICT services, renewable energy and satellite based applications. Taking into account the great interest in the call and its high potential impact, 2 additional sectoral partnerships will be added to the KIS -IP. Proposals should put emphasis on fostering service innovations within a specific industrial sector, thus addressing the linkages between manufacturing and services. The proposed sector should be justified in the proposal in view of its innovation potential. Market sectors of high political priority, such as those identified by the Lead Market Initiative (LMI), which are not yet covered by the three existing sectoral partnerships, will be prioritised. As a matter of principle, only the most promising proposal for a given sector will be retained for funding.

The second phase of the KIS -IP will build upon the established structure and follow the same general approach. The new activities will be launched as public -private partnerships that are committed to develop, test and validate new or better tools and instruments in support of innovative service companies. Building on previous insights makes it possible to gear the bundled efforts towards supplying new or better tools for supporting the innovation capacity of KIS companies operating in priority areas as identified by the LMI. Such a targeted, bundled undertaking can only be mastered by partners who are strong and committed to work together very closely.

Taking into account the experience from phase 1, some activities are made mandatory whereas for other fields to be covered different options exist. This offers the necessary flexibility to potential partners to build on their own strengths while ensuring at the same time the integrity of the overall KIS -IP. As for the first phase, the Europe INNOVA Communications facilities will be used, and the projects will cooperate with the horizontal KIS -IP project (KISPLATFORM) regarding all communication and dissemination activities.

This action will be implemented through an open Call for proposals, within the Europe INNOVA initiative . Proposals should support the KIS-IP in market sectors identified by the Lead Market Initiative, which are not yet covered by the three existing sectoral partnerships. As a matter of principle, only the most promising proposal for a given sector will be retained for funding.

Objectives

Many European innovation policy initiatives, such as PAXIS, Gate2Growth, Europe INNOVA, INNO -Actions under PRO INNO Europe or exploratory actions of the IRC network, helped to identify elements of good practice in support of innovative companies, including knowledge transfer from universities to enterprises, incubation services and access to finance. Efforts undertaken to leverage such good practices broadly into the mainstream of innovation support proved insufficient. With the new generation of Europe INNOVA, the emphasis will shift from support to the identification and dissemination of good practice to the development and practical implementation of new or better tools through public-private partnerships, which requires stronger commitment from all partners.

An important lesson learned from previous experience is that further specialisation and consolidation in the provision of business services in support of innovation is needed, in order to better valorise knowledge and to better exploit entrepreneurial talents for more innovation. A more integrated approach that brings together the different support mechanisms for innovative ventures in a consistent and user -friendly manner is still a challenge. The existing tools and instruments in support of innovative enterprises are often still too fragmented and lack a clear focus on potential fast growing enterprises, which present the most interesting segment for job creation and innovation. The objective of the KIS -IP is to contribute to a streamlining of the different innovation support mechanisms for SMEs, while at the same time better taking into account the specific needs of innovative service companies with high growth potential. This seems to be the area where most European value added can be expected.

To identify and financially support the most promising ventures and preparing them for international expansion, closer links between knowledge creation, incubation, finance and clusters would be a great advantage. Currently, investors seem not to have easy access to the European pool of talents (deal -flow) and are mainly operating in a local or regional environment. As a result, the average funding of innovative start -ups in Europe is much lower than in the US, where major innovation hubs exist that facilitate that smart international innovators and investors easily find each other. The KIS -IP could be an important step to change this situation. The aim is to support the creation of more “European champions” in fields of innovative services, by removing potential innovation barriers and turning “would be winners” into winners.

The objective of the KIS -IP is to foster technological as well as non -technological innovation in services, by addressing market failures and eliminating barriers to service innovation. It will help innovative SMEs to better exploit research results and to facilitate the search for investors and business partners. The KIS -IP will achieve this by developing new or better tools for innovation support in a targeted way, addressing particularly the needs of innovative service companies with the ambition to grow and internationalise fast. In this sense, the KIS-IP will contribute to a modernisation of innovation support mechanisms in Europe, with the objective to increase their efficiency and to lower administrative costs for SMEs. To this end, the Eco-innovation-IP may liaise with the Cluster-IP for the testing or adoption of their new tools and to facilitate access of SMEs to clusters involved in the Cluster -IP, thus enhancing synergies between the different activities under Europe INNOVA.

The potential benefits of the KIS -IP are twofold: Whereas it is t he overall objective of the KIS -IP to develop and test new tools and instruments in support of innovative service companies which can ultimately be further used by other service providers, such as notably the Enterprise Europe Network, a large number of innovative SMEs will directly benefit from this activity. The new tools and instruments shall be tested under real life conditions in the field, involving as many innovative SMEs as possible. Hereby, new forms of service delivery will be experimented, with t he objective to better customising innovation support services and reducing the administrative burdens for SMEs.