INNOWWIDE aims to bring European highly innovative SMEs to the forefront of international markets by prototyping and shaping a new and unique financial scheme (the “INNOWWIDE Call for proposals”) that will allow them to conduct Viability Assessment Projects (VAPs) in cooperation with local stakeholders, creating the conditions to increase the uptake of European innovative solutions in markets outside Europe. Two calls will be implemented with a total budget of 7,2M€, allowing to fund 120 VAPs (60k€/VAP), and targeting markets of developing countries, large emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Mexico) and developed countries with the same allocation for each of these three country categories. The strength of this initiative lies in: (1) the experience of project partners concerning calls for proposals design and management, having 8 European funding agencies among them; (2) a SME-centric approach, to be implemented thanks to the extensive access and links to the European SMEs that project partners have; and (3) an ambitious stakeholder mobilisation plan with a strong focus on third country players thanks to partners international network of delegations (130 offices abroad in 45 countries). Project impact will be evaluated following a holistic, multilevel assessment approach covering European and international dimensions, done at VAP and at call level, and providing information from qualitative and quantitative points of view. This valuable information will be used to draw R&I policy conclusions, that will be shared with relevant policy bodies through the creation and operation of the “INNOWWIDE Policy Working Group”.

WHO: The proposal involves 40 National Funding Authorities and/or Agencies under the Umbrella of Eureka and is coordinated by the Eureka Secretariat in Brussels. Founded in 1985, Eureka is a global network, with 48 Member States plus the European Commission. It includes nearly all countries of the European continent as well as international members like Israel, Turkey, Korea, Canada, Singapore, South Africa, Argentina and Chile. The Consortium also benefits from the fact that is has successfully run the Eurostars 1 and 2 programs. WHAT: The proposed European Partnership on Innovative SMEs will comprise two main instruments (Eurostars 3 and Innowwide) as well as measures to connect to existing EU programs, initiatives and other European partnerships. EUROSTARS 3 (E*3) is an instrument that supports the international cooperation of SMEs in the field of non-military collaborative innovation projects. An E*3 project consortium must be composed of at least 2 independent entities from at least two participating countries and must be led by an innovative SME. The E*3 instrument benefits from accompanying measures that strengthen SMEs’ ability to access foreign markets like the INNOWWIDE instrument, which has already been piloted with the support of some Eureka network members in recent years. WHY: The biggest challenges for innovative SMEs are the access to international cooperation and to enter international markets as well the ability to receive funding. E*3 through its coordination of national innovation programs will in addition support the further development of a European Research Area. HOW: The Eureka Secretariat will organize two joint transnational calls per year for E*3 and one call per year for Innowwide. National Innovation Agencies actively support the implementation of E*3 via national funding and support measures as well as services to applicants and promotion of the program.

The implementation of participatory practices for the development of innovations has gained prominence over the last years. Through introducing open R&I configurations innovators can gather additional knowledge about the needs and desires of citizens, public and semi-public caretakers, NGOs, social entrepreneurs etc. and thus be able to answer those through innovative products and processes. However, the ways how this is done, how it is based on legal and regulatory frameworks and to what extent ethical issues are taken into account differ massively between various countries and contexts. Furthermore, concrete concerns regarding the protection of participating non-traditional stakeholders (e.g. citizens) and their potential exploitation emerge with these new modes of innovation. Therefore, PRO-Ethics elaborates an ethics framework with principles, guidelines, assessment criteria, good practice and proposals on regulatory environments how citizens’ engagement can be properly put in place without disregarding ethical principles of fairness, transparency, gender, privacy and sustainability. This will be done through iterative discourse and learning loops together with eight participating research funding organisations (RFOs), five expert partners and two international organisations. Furthermore, the framework will be applied, tested and validated in real life through 11 practical cases and experimental pilots implemented by the RFOs in three different action fields (i.e. project funding; strategy development and evaluation). PRO-Ethics will have an European-wide outreach, nevertheless, it will incorporate and compare local conditions and other specific and cultural characteristics of the partnering RFOs from Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Spain and Brussels implementing the PRO-Ethics cases and pilots.

This proposal is the continuation of the Description of the Action of the Grant Agreement 101055476 signed under the European Innovation Ecosystems Work Programme 2021-2022. The proposal involves 41 National/regional Funding Bodies and/ Agencies under the umbrella of Eureka, and is coordinated by the Eureka Secretariat in Brussels. The partnership will be comprised of two main instruments(Eurostars-3 and Innowwide) as well as accompanying measures to further supports SMEs and to connect existing EU programmes, initiatives and other European partnerships. On this proposal, the consortium describes the additional activities that will take place under the EIE WP 2023-2024. The activities implemented under this Work Programme mirror to a great extent those described in the DoA.

SMEs highly benefit from successful research that results in applicable solutions. It is either by monetizing their own innovative solutions or by cooperating with a research organization and bringing the shared results onto the market or other space for exploitation. In order to help this process by employing public funding and supporting activities, it is important to be able to detect and evaluate exploitation potential in research projects that are to receive the support. The partners of this project are public organizations supporting applied research by funding and assistance. They believe that in order to positively influence the research-driving SMEs and research-implementing SMEs, it is essential to be able to evaluate projects from the perspective of exploitation (or in other words application) potential. Specifically, it is key to be able to, first of all, select the most promising project proposals for support (the proposals with the highest exploitation potential) and, second, help them to successfully finish their projects and implement their results by interim and ex-post monitoring complemented with support services. Therefore, this project’s goal is to build a peer-learning group and share each other’s best practices and experiences and apply them in practice in order to improve project partners’ proposal-evaluation and project monitoring skills in terms of exploitation potential. This improvement could lead to higher success rate of the projects and their better impact assessment (Alves Ribeiro, 2015). Finally, the project also has a goal to disseminate its results among other research and innovation supporting organisations in Europe.