Abstract:

The EU has set ambitious goals toward green and digital transition, investing in various initiatives and projects that promote sustainable development in the region, focusing on the environment, innovation, and economic growth. Numerous RDI projects are funded to provide new opportunities, address societal and business challenges, and produce new operating concepts, business models, solutions, and tools for companies. SMEs are the driving force in economic development, and they need innovative business products and solutions and would benefit from collaborations with research organizations. At the same time, many of them, the smaller ones in particular, often face several challenges in utilizing the results of EU-funded projects. In many cases, the lessons, results, and outputs are utilized only by the organizations involved in the projects and their direct target audiences. There is a need to transform the RDI project culture and democratize access to the RDI project results for SMEs in order to open new business opportunities and increase the innovation capacity of SMEs.

This paper describes the results of the pilot activities aimed at enabling access of SMEs to the results of RDI projects completed at Finnish higher education institution (HEI). Before the pilots, the state-of-art situation was analyzed by surveying RDI staff (n=94) and companies (n=33). The surveys aimed to explore the challenges associated with enabling the sustainability of completed RDI projects and, more specifically, communication and exploitation of the results by SMEs. The pilots were organized in May 2022 and February 2023 and involved communication training for the RDI staff of the HEI and the organization of the expo of the RDI projects.

The communication trainings included various workshops aimed at developing presentation materials and practicing oral presentation (pitching). The aim of the trainings was to remove the existing barriers in communication styles between RDI staff and SMEs. Two events were organized at HEI, first at the local and then at the national level. The RDI projects were presented at the stands and during the pitching sessions. After the pilot, the feedback of the RDI staff (n=32) and the companies (n=12) was collected. The results show that the events promoted communication and knowledge transfer between the RDI staff of the HEI and the SMEs. It was also found that the concept of the training and event can be further scaled up to the international level to address the lack of access of SMEs to the RDI project results and to create genuine scalability and cross-border utilization of the projects results. The international pilot initiative has been developed by 24 organizations and supported by the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region.

Keywords:

University-Industry Cooperation, Innovation, Innovation Transfer.