SMEs are the driving force of economic growth and job creation in Europe: 20.7 Million SMEs in the non-financial business economy make up ~99% EU enterprises. 85 % of new jobs in the private sector created by SMEs provide more than two thirds of total jobs (more than 87M). And SMEs account for more than 58% of the total gross-value added in Europe. For SMEs, the backbone of the European Industry, H2020 is looking into completely new funding measures and project types. The new SME instrument, which is used by the various industrial and societal program lines in H2020, offers not only a new 3-phase project development and implementation - from idea validation to market. It also offers those SMEs, which win the race and receive funding, a new form of accompanying support: key account managers and coaches, which are meant to help SME to keep track on their target of growth through innovation. By providing key account management and enhanced innovation services, the overall objective of the BW-KAM project is to enhance the innovation management capacity of SMEs in the geographical area of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which is also the geographical area covered by the EEN –BW. BW-KAM will target SME beneficiaries in the SME Instrument, which are located in Baden-Württemberg as well as high potential SME with strong innovation activities and high potential for internationalization and growth. SEZ will deliver up to 30 service packages.

Despite the fact that SMEs can strongly benefit from implementation of the Open Innovation (OI) in many dimensions, the opportunities for the application of the OI model in SMEs still remain unexploited due to the different factors (e.g. insufficient support of the policies/incentives, difficulties in accessing the existing funding schemes supporting innovations, lack of capacities/awareness/know-how etc.). With limited resources and by acting only in limed environments, the potentials for innovation-related information flows and collaboration opportunities for SMEs are commonly restricted in all terms. Recognising the importance of establishing the new cross-sector value chains and infrastructures as new business ecosystems, InnTense aims at first line to explore current tendencies and to develop a methodology which will offer comprehensive support to SMEs in overcoming the barriers for successful application of the OI and its implementation on the broader levels. InnTense Project is a Peer learning of innovation agencies action, bringing together three Project partner from three EU Member States (Germany, Italy and Croatia) with an aim of setting up the standardised methodology for the innovation support for SMEs. Based on the pervious experiences and faced challenges, InnTense Project partners will analyse, assess and document the current state, factors, drivers, hindrances and benefits for the application of the OI model in SMEs, aiming at reinforcement of the SMEs innovation capacities. In order to achieve the main project outcome – InnTense Design Option Paper, the Partnership will apply a sequence of tasks which will be constituting parts of the Twinning Advanced methodology, underpinning the InnTense Project. In this way InnTense aims to deliver SMEs support for the enhancement of the innovation capacities, at the same time establishing the permanent learning instrument for Innovation support agencies.

Many SMEs are not willing to invest time and resources in developing their internal innovation systems. The lack of innovation management capacity among Swedish SMEs might very well be the main reason why certain government support schemes to Swedish innovative SMEs do not indicate any significant impact. The support actions "Enhancing the innovation management capacity of SMEs by the Enterprise Europe Network" in 2014 and 2015 includes a standardised innovation management capacity assessment (e.g. using IMP3rove), a gap analysis and the provision of targeted services to address recognised gaps. However, the action does not involve activities, methods or tools on how these gaps could be filled, only that they are recognised. The objective of this project proposal is to address these problems by using the tool Twinning Advanced to explore an innovation support challenge, which is to develop, design and re-design new and existing innovation services as standardised modules so that support organisations can assess the needs and deliver the most appropriate support more efficiently. The peer learning will take place between three innovation agencies, who are also partners in the Enterprise Europe Network, and with external expert organisations depending on the outcome. The result will be documented in a Design Option Paper (DOP) that will identify and document implementation options, guidelines and implementation alternatives that we have experienced and would recommend to other innovation support service agencies. The DOP would particularly address Enterprise Europe Network partners in Europe to meet common needs expressed by SMEs that need to increase their innovation management capacity. The specific objective is to document at least five such modules describing how to implement 1) an innovation strategy, 2) an innovation culture, 3) an innovation life cycle process, 4) enabling factors, and 5) a system for assessing outputs of innovation management.

Smart systems, in which sophisticated software/hardware is embedded in physical systems are part of everyday life. From simple products with embedded decision making software to massive systems in which hundreds of systems, each with hundreds or thousands of embedded processors, interoperate, the growth of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is likely to accelerate. For Europe to benefit from this expansion, while avoiding the pitfalls that such complexity creates, there must be advances in the modelling and simulation (M&S) of CPS. Collaborative research with the US will be an opportunity to advance European M&S capabilities for CPS. The overall aim of TAMS4CPS is to lay the foundations for concrete EU-US collaboration in modelling and simulation for cyber-physical systems. To achieve this, Loughborough and Newcastle Universities (M&S) will work with Steinbeis Innovation (road mapping) and leading researchers in the field at top US universities to create: - A strategic research and collaboration agenda, endorsed by researchers in EU and US - A set of test cases for model developers to perform collaborative evaluation - A state of the art web-based report to act as a baseline for collaborative research Taking a consultative approach, we will engage industry and academic researchers and M&S users in workshops and web-based meetings to prioritise M&S research challenges and to create a constituency of future collaboration partners for pre-competitive research in the Artemis themes, of: - Architectures principles and models for safe secure Cyber-Physical Systems - Systems design, modelling and virtual engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems - Autonomous adaptive and cooperative of Cyber-Physical Systems - Computing platforms and energy management for Cyber-Physical Systems To which is added the exploitation and enabling theme of: - Integration of socio/legal/governance models within modelling frameworks Thus, this project directly addresses European priorities in CPS.