Project duration: 1 January 2020 – 31 December 2021
Objective
The project aims at enhancing the innovation capacity within the ESEE region by establishing individual concepts for regional ecosystem effective university-based incubators based on joint knowledge transfer and individual concept development. This will happen aligned with the ECLC Business Creation & Support activities and programs in the ESEE region and will be verified with actual start-ups. Minimum 6 RIS task partners (2 Universities, minimum 4 start-ups) will join the initial consortium. The project will show a one-year concept phase, followed by a one-year implementation period – but shall become sustainable on long term.
The solution (technology)
Even though university-based incubators have become a common part of innovation systems, they often do not manage to assume their role of innovation boosters in the national and regional ecosystems. This is especially because they fail at creating strong links to the key players in the regional innovation ecosystems, such as research institutions, industry, public sector and existing entrepreneurship initiatives – but also aligned with EIT KIC activities. Furthermore, they often lack a systematic approach to innovation as well as knowledge on innovation schemes.
As response to these problems, the outlined project aims in general at jointly developing specific tailor-made concepts for regional university-based incubators in the raw materials and related sectors in East and South-East Europe, focussing on the local/regional ecosystems and using the knowledge and experience of the project participants for enhancing their innovation capacity. Moreover, the KIC good practices of the Knowledge Triangle Integration (academia – business – qualification) will be transferred from the concept phase on, making the ecosystems integral parts of the innovation incubators and strengthening the role of the universities in their regional innovation ecosystems (create knowledge and job opportunities for graduates, attract industry, etc.). Incubators will be able to engineer and deliver added-value services to the regional entrepreneurial community and thus, foster the creation of innovative and sustainable start-up companies with a focus on raw materials and related sectors or cross-sectional technologies.
As the ECLC of EIT RM has the overall scope to develop and support related ecosystems in the ESEE region it already reaches out to local incubators and ecosystems in the region with the aim to identify relevant idea holders and (potential) start-up in these countries, to ultimately increase the participation from these countries in the KIC´s Business Creations & Support programs and thus, create impact on those ecosystems.
The Innovation-Incubator project activities (and especially beyond the project phase) shall be aligned with these outreach activities of the ECLC, meaning that – by transferring the knowledge and good practice from more established ones into those that need capacity building – one significant objective of the project is to contribute to the ECLC´s “BC&S Plan for RIS Countries”, helping to create start-ups from the KIC´s Education and Innovation projects. In fact the Incubators involved in this project shall be enabled and supported to contribute to these KIC´s objectives, measurable by countable results. Therefore, already in the project phase itself, the theoretical approach of the project shall be verified by bringing along, supporting or even creating start-ups by each of the participating University Incubators and integrating them into the project.
Partnership
- Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STU), Slovakia
- Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
- Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia
- University of Miskolc, Hungary
- Zentrum für angewandte Technologie Leoben GmbH, Austria
- Montanuniversität Leoben (Lead Partner), Austria