What will the project do? The GPrix project will assess a set of regional innovation support measures in a representative set of seven European regions characterized by a large number of SMEs from traditional sectors including the automotive, textiles, leather, ceramics, mechanical/metallurgy and food sectors. These measures will be benchmarked with EU support programmes in order to identify good practices in innovation support measures to produce a set of recommendations for the upcoming framework programme.
Why is this important?
A great number of measures currently exist to directly or indirectly support innovation in Europe, including measures supporting technology transfer, incubation and access to finance. These measures play a key role to help organizations to innovate better and faster, by addressing specific market and system failures hindering European companies, and in particular SMEs, to fully exploit their innovation potential.
The effectiveness of innovation support measures can be evaluated using the following two concepts; additionality and composition. Additionality refers to how much extra private innovation and Research and Development (R&D) will be performed resulting from public support, while composition refers to which R&D and innovation projects are stimulated.