BACKGROUND.Global competition has generated the need among all the enterprises, especially SMEs, to adjust their strategies for survival.As a result of T4 actions, the interviewed stakeholders complained of lack of skills and knowledge to allow companies have a dedicated person to facilitate the transfer of modern technologies, products and services so as to accelerate the development for survival on the market in the fight with big companies.It has so emerged that the proposed occupation, the Transnational Technology Transfer Manager, is mandatory for the development strategy. TTTM must possess, apart form the professional technical abilities, competences which should enable European harmonization (leadership, economic and legislative knowledge, ability to mediate between social groups with different cultures etc). OBJECTIVES.The general objective of T4 was to increase and upgrade skills and competences of European SMEs in the field of transnational technology transfer and accelerate public and private stakeholder organizations in increasing their responsiveness to SMEs skills needs. T4 aimed at 1)minding the gap between SMEs and transnational technology innovation processes;2)establishing a permanent, transparent, recognition oriented, evolving&multi-actor training mechanism which will allow to respond to the needs of SME's;3)increasing institutional capacity and awareness of responsible actors of industrial, technological and training policies about the role of transnational technology transfer for SMEs and extend cooperation between SMEs, Research, Service Providers and VET&Training System actors.TARGET GROUPS included:SMEs:managers,technical and administrative staff,consultants;Cluster Organizations:technical staff,consultants;R&D Centre / Universities:researchers,technical staff;Technology Parks and Business Development Centres: technical staff,consultants;Economic Development Bodies:policy officers,management,technical staff;VET and Higher Education:trainers, researchers, technical staff, administrative staff, learners.The directly involved target groups members was 650 units, but due to multiple information in various media channels, we consider that the number can be 1000.ACTIVITIES.In order to achieve the planned objectives, T4 has been structured so as to obtain the four IOs which were implemented by 7 complementary partners combining training, technology, outreach to SMEs and policy anchoring capacities.The 8 Work-packages were:WP1-Project Management;WP2-Quality Management;WP3-Evaluation and Risk Management;WP4-Dissemination and Exploitation;WP5-inding the GAP: SMEs& TTT (M2-M6) created a knowledge base about current successful practices which combined technology transfer&training methods to support these processes and further strengthen them; WP6-Mapping skills needs&Develop Competence Profile(M6-M11) which focused on mapping the competences of the TTTM; WP7(M11-M24) focused on producing the curriculum and in the development and testing of the TTTM Training Program;WP8(M20-M26) delivered 2 sets of final guidelines, one for policy levels and the second one for VET system & Innovation system actors and a template of Memorandum of Understanding in order to set up of a TTT Training Cooperation Network.RESULTS. Main project results can be summarized as follows:1)SMEs increased awareness level about technology transfer processes at transnational level;2)Training&Service Providers increased knowledge about how to simplify technology transfer processes;3)available training (including competence profile, training course structure, content and self-enrollment E-learning platform);4)increased capacity of the educational/training/service side to respond to educational/training needs with a more close to market and understandable language;5)participation of the governance level&VET System actors to the information and awareness raising initiatives;6)increased knowledge about how developed training can be transformed & readapted according to technological trends and SMEs needs(and how formal VET training course can be anchored to more situational learning settings based on SMEs daily operations);7)achieving of a good collaboration between partners;8)harmonization of know-how transfer between them and familiarity with cultural specifics of involved countries.The impact of our short-term activities was to raise awareness of the need to develop such a business within companies, creating a win-win collaboration. In a long terms perspective the project aims at creating a winning cooperation mechanism between training&educational system and European SMEs which will contribute to adopt transnational technology transfer as a means to accelerate growth and development.A major benefit consisted in observing the enthusiasm and satisfaction of the contacted stakeholders in finding the solution to solve the problem they had been struggling with for a long time, namely surviving on a market dominated by the big companies.

In order to help SMEs to fully realise their potentials and overcome market failures specific to them, public support to innovation in SMEs is available with a wide range of instruments and support services. At this point, innovation support agencies play a substantial role as intermediates for SME innovation by designing and delivering the innovation support programmes. However, despite the recent strong engagements and delivery of diverse innovation support schemes, addressing different innovation challenges, innovation support agencies still lack in a provision of evidence-based results which will demonstrate effectives of these newly developed schemes. Strengthening innovation management capacities in SMEs is defined as one of priorities of the future agenda for creating market-oriented innovation, but on the other hand, market potential of Social Innovation seems to become in the focus in the past year. Yet this kind of innovation is not well known and acceptance seems to be still low. With an aim of addressing these key challenges - creating an evidence-based innovation support scheme and comprising two central aspects (economic and social), DepoSIt Project objectives to develop a significantly improved innovation support scheme - Innovation Audit tool for Social Innovation and test it in a real environment conditions. By the application of Randomised Control Trial (RCT) method, six DepoSIt Project partners from six EU countries, active and experienced in design and delivery of innovation support programmes, will test the scheme by engaging min. 60 SMEs and in this way examine its effectives. Successful experimentation results will lead to the scheme validation and its upscaling. Furthermore, the Project aims to serve as a best practice example in this way to stimulate and deploy additional innovation agencies (min. 18) to become more effective and efficient in design, delivery and especially in experimentation of designed innovation support schemes.

This action will establish and provide the innovation support services addressing in general Croatian SMEs with significant innovation activities and in particular the beneficiaries of the SME instrument. This action will provide continuation of the SSBI-CRO-KAM proposal which is currently implemented under the remit of H2020 for the period of 2014. In particular defining innovation support packages (84 of them and shared between partners based on the needs analysis) for: • Key Account Management (KAM) of successful SME Instrument applicants to identify bottlenecks to creation of economic impact in companies benefiting from grants by Horizon 2020, • Enhancing client SME’s capacity to manage innovation processes increasing their efficiency and effectiveness. Project partners UniSt, TPV, Tera and HAMAG-BICRO will each individually provide number of service packages according to the analysis of regional needs (regional coverage, number and readiness of clients). Envisaged outcome of this action is to provide services to about 84 SMEs in 2015-2016, including all beneficiaries of support under the Horizon 2020 SME instrument.

This action will establish and provide the innovation support services addressing in general Croatian SMEs with significant innovation activities and in particular the beneficiaries of the SME instrument. This action will provide continuation of the SSBI-CRO-KAM-2 proposal which is currently implemented under the remit of H2020 In particular defining innovation support packages for: • Key Account Management (KAM) of successful SME Instrument applicants to identify bottlenecks to creation of economic impact in companies benefiting from grants by Horizon 2020, • Enhancing client SME’s capacity to manage innovation processes increasing their efficiency and effectiveness. Project partners UniSt, STEPRI, TPV, Tera and HAMAG-BICRO will each individually provide number of service packages according to the analysis of regional needs (regional coverage, number and readiness of clients). Envisaged outcome of this action is to provide services to SMEs in 2017-2018, including all beneficiaries of support under the Horizon 2020 SME instrument.