MED4INNO Project proposal is an extension of the running MED2EUROPE Project financed under COSME Program for Enterprise Europe Network activity. The project covers the whole French Mediterranean area with 3 regions: Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur (PACA), Eastern part of Occitanie (ex LR) and Corsica (NUTS1 region FR7). The main objective of the project is to contribute to the increase of competitiveness of our most promising and innovative companies through 2 specific activities : - Enhancing Innovation Management Capacity action (EIMC): for SMEs with significant innovation activities and/or with a high growth potential for international development - Key Account Management action (KAM): for SMEs which are benefiting from European grants provided by the European Innovation Council (EIC Pilot) such as SME Instrument, Accelerator, Pathfinder FET or Fast Track to Innovation (FTI), which need in depth support to make them potential future European Champions.

The project involves 3 partners of the Enterprise Europe Network South West France consortium which covers the region Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the Midi-Pyrénées territory. The general objective is to contribute to raise the competitiveness of SMEs from this area by offering support services in the area of innovation management. The project will also contribute to develop more efficient and more effective innovation processes and higher quality innovation management capacity assessment and support services. The support will be delivered as service packages to 2 groups of SMEs: a) Beneficiaries of the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument, Fast Track to Innovation and Future Emerging Technologies Open: to enhance the probability of a successful exploitation of the innovation project results and lead to the sustainable growth of the beneficiary beyond the participation in Horizon 2020. The support service will pinpoint weaknesses in the innovation capacities of the beneficiary, select suitable coaches to address the identified weaknesses and monitor the coach-client relationship and to accompany the beneficiary through the SME instrument project b) SMEs with significant innovation activities and a high potential for internationalisation: to enhance their innovation management capacities to be able to gain new international markets and leaderships. The support service will consist in an in-depth innovation assessment in order to develop and implement a tailored action plan to improve the SMEs capacity to manage innovation processes. The partners will use dedicated assessment tools: IMP3rove, Check’Innov and Innovation Way. The project will last 12 months and will provide 63 support service packages.

Food business is the first sector in terms of employment in Europe, 90% of food companies being SMEs (majority of them being micro enterprises). Though innovation is the main leverage to improve competitiveness, there is neither high enough innovation and entrepreneurship spirit nor innovation transfer from High Education Institutes (HEI) to business. The partners of this consortium, involved for years in initiatives aiming at fostering innovation and interactions between students and industry on the basis of project-based learning approach, identified limits of the current training approaches. The project performance will be notably assessed against the generation of new products or processes and the creation of value and long term collaborations. For this purpose, it will create a European FoodBusiness Transfer Laboratory that will centralize new educational content and tools to foster stimulate entrepreneurship entrepreneurial skills and will allow constructive interactions between HEIs and foodbusiness stakeholders. Supported by a shared web-platform allowing multidisciplinary knowledge exchanges between the partners, this project will also produce best practices for entrepreneurship development, new learning and teaching approaches in closer contact with industry, etc. Taken together, FOODLAB project’s results will homogenize educational approaches; improve interactions between academia and industry; develop entrepreneurship spirit; foster innovation and competences transfer; promote integration of young graduated in SMEs. Ultimately this project will be the basis of competitiveness improvement in food SMEs and bigger companies. It will also help to maintain and increase employment in food sector and possibly in other sectors, as the present project is designed to allow transfer of methodology and best practices in training to other sectors.