France

The Paris Region Innovation Center has three key missions:
- Assisting innovative SMEs implement their projects:
With extensive hands-on expertise in engineering innovative projects, the Center’s advisers provide SMEs support prior to the marketing process for their innovative project by helping them find the right partners, the skills they need to achieve their plans and sources of funding. The Center even assists SMEs in their project’s planning phase so they can adopt a responsible innovation approach.
- Circulating good practices for responsible innovation and academic research partnerships:
The Center specifically supports responsible innovation, which is not only intended to anticipate new markets but also reduces the environmental footprint and promotes social equality. The Center has set up a targeted advisory approach to encourage SMEs in the Paris region to apply the principles of sustainable development in the planning phase of their project. The Center works closely with the tech transfer offices at research institutes to disseminate their work and help companies apply their know-how. It develops and directs the Paris Region Innovation Network to help create a community of public and private stakeholders to benefit innovative SMEs in the Paris region.
- Networking public and private innovation stakeholders:
The Center unites a variety of public and private stakeholders who promote research, innovation and economic development within the Paris Region Innovation Network. The Network’s team of mediators organises events where members of the Network can meet one another, see which skills and initiatives other members are offering, learn about the Center’s resources and exchange ideas on consulting services and joint project support measures for SMEs. The Center also provides training courses so the Network’s members can come together to address multidisciplinary topics and improve their skills.

Business Crescendo is an international business development consulting firm with offices in Paris, Montpellier and San Francisco (opening end of 2013).  We help innovative companies succeed with their new product launches and international development projects. Our services include market entry strategy development, target customer/partner identification, and sales implementation in France, Europe and the USA. Our international team has significant business development expertise in diverse sectors. Our attractive performance-based remuneration approach limits the financial risk of our clients and ensures a project focused on success.

ISIS is a center of excellence and applied research within ESSEC Business School in Paris and Singapore. Created in January 2004 through the combined involvement of companies such as BMW, Bouygues, CSC and EDF, ISIS aims at generating, stimulating and promoting innovation in the 21^st century service & knowledge economy. Its goal is to contribute to sustainable growth and to the competitiveness of organizations. To this purpose, ISIS instructs the mechanisms of innovation, capitalizes on good practices, accompanies firms through organizational and managerial change and elaborates means to measure the performance and the creative capacity of teams. ISIS leads an international network of economic and academic partners focused on one common goal: the development of concrete knowledge and of structured know-how. A community has been built and continues to grow through the ongoing exchanges, sharing and broadcasting of experiences.

Germany

MFG Innovation Agency for ICT and Media Baden-Württemberg has been strengthening Baden-Württemberg as a business location for IT, media and creative industries since 1995. MFG improves regional innovation and competitiveness including the promotion of regional, national and international cooperation. Its focus is on the support of successful entrepreneurship especially in small and medium-sized companies, also connecting them with application-oriented research and public funding programmes.
MFG hosts a variety of clusters and networks and delivers targeted services (ISO 9001 certified) in the area of innovation management, technology transfer and regional development and marketing. By managing Coach&Connect MFG has built up broad experience in training startups, young enterprises and young scientists on how to develop business plans and set up their own companies.
MFG is also the initiator and organizer of the Heidelberg Innovation Forum a regional innovation forum, which match researchers, startup companies, investors and entrepreneurs, thus accelerating innovation and pushing businesses.

Ireland

University College Dublin (UCD) is Ireland’s largest University. It is a leading research-intensive university ranked 134 in the QS World University Ranking (2011). It has over 23,000 students, 6,000 graduate students and 1,300 academics. Over 50% of UCD undergraduates progress to 4th level masters and PhD studies.
In 2010-11 UCD was awarded over 420 new research contracts totaling €89m. Alongside Teaching and Research, Innovation is the third pillar in the University’s Strategy 2010-2014 – a key aspect of which is to maximize the commercialisation of research, build stronger industry collaborations including SMEs, and to establish a framework for entrepreneurship and innovation skills training. UCD has a major contractual track record in successive EU Programmes, including Framework Programmes and INTERREG.
UCD’s College of Engineering and Architecture comprises ~80 Research Principal Investigators and their associated research teams, working in areas of Energy, Materials Engineering, Nanobio Science & Engineering, Biomedical Device Technologies, Environment, and Computational Modelling. These people will contribute to and participate in this project

Netherlands

TU Delft is a university of technology with a very strong reputation internationally. The faculties at TU Delft are internationally recognised as being among the best in their field, in terms of education, research and design. The faculties are home to an enormous technical-scientific and economic potential. Their reputation – and therefore that of TU Delft as a whole – is based on the individual and collective achievements of the many generations of researchers, designers, lecturers and countless engineers who have been or are being trained in Delft.
The section Technology, Strategy and Entrepreneurship (TSE) in the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) conducts research and provides education in the fields of innovation management, entrepreneurship and strategy, all taken from a business perspective. TSE operates the Delft Centre for Entrepreneurship which encourages students and researchers from the TU Delft to become entrepreneurs or to engage in entrepreneurial activity.

UK

Lancaster University has a world class reputation as a centre for excellence in teaching, scholarship and research. Highly ranked in UK and global league tables, Lancaster continues to sustain its reputation for teaching and research excellence both nationally and internationally. Our knowledge exchange strategy aims to generate high-impact research by making sure that 20% of our research is undertaken with partners outside the university through collaborative research, consultancy, commercialisation of intellectual property, student placements, innovation vouchers and enterprise-awareness training for staff and students. The Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC) brings together academic researchers from the University of Lancaster alongside the Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) and a growing number of co-located businesses. With over 450 scientists and £35 million of capital investment, LEC forms one of the largest centres of its kind in Europe.

The Ecodesign Centre (EDC) is an applied research organisation that aims to build capacity and capabilities to enable effective ecodesign and eco-innovation in industry, in particular SMEs. EDC is part of the CARDIFF Metropolitan University. Unique within the UK, EDC was designated a ‘Centre of Expertise’ by the Welsh Government in 2008 as a result of its excellent track record in delivering award-winning ecodesign and ecoinnovation projects in a range of industry sectors. Through its role as a Centre of Expertise / strategic adviser to the Welsh Government EDC will ensure that the project partners and network have a direct link to the relevant regional policy makers and innovation support organisations. EDC has links with all of the universities in Wales and the regional government knowledge exchange manager. EDC create ecodesign knowledge through applied research, participation in UK and international networks, collaborative projects and international best practice scanning. A key role of EDC is to translate policy into practice.

Switzerland

The HTW Chur is a university of applied sciences in the canton Grisons in Switzerland. Its five departments: Management, Tourism, Information Science, Engineering, Construction & Design, and Media are offering Bachelor and Master of Science programs as well as professional development courses such as Executive MBA classes.
Besides these educational activities the HTW is mandated by the canton government to act as the SME centre, which is implemented by the Swiss Institute for Entrepreneurship (SIFE). The mandate includes innovation support of SMEs and the transfer of technology and knowledge between universities and SMEs. Many of the tasks conducted by the SIFE are corresponding to actions in all three working packages of the project proposal.
The SIFE is also part of the WTT CHost (Transfer of Knowledge and Technology in Eastern Switzerland) funded by the Confederation’s Innovation Promotion Agency (CTI). In this cooperation the HTW Chur is codesigning regional open innovation systems (ROIS). The ROIS is a pilot model addressing SMEs with difficulties in technology and knowledge transfer and innovative behaviour.
The research and consulting activities at the HTW institute SIFE are focusing on the internationalizing of SMEs, the management of technology and innovation, and business development. A recently defined and announced field of research between the management department and the SIFE is Social and Sustainability Entrepreneurship which is perfectly corresponding to the focus of the KARIM proposal on responsible innovation.

BSK-CiC is a Community Interest Company that is dedicated to supporting SMEs to develop and grow. Our work can be summed up as ‘Preparing Businesses for Tomorrow’. We have an outstanding 15 year track record of delivering UK and European funded programmes across the South East of England and Northern Europe.
Our core expertise is in the following 4 key areas:
- Enterprise Development: Supporting new business start ups, including entrepreneur coaching in universities and with disadvantaged groups.
- Sustainability and the Low Carbon Economy: Using BSK-CiC expertise to ensure SMEs have access to advice and tools to reduce their carbon footprint and take advantage of Low Carbon business opportunities.
- Coaching Innovation for High Growth Companies: Driving economic growth and employment through enabling companies with global ambition and with the highest potential to innovate and grow to move up to the next level of effectiveness and profitability.
- Internationalisation and Knowledge Transfer: Provision of internationalisation and innovation services to enable SMEs to do business in Europe. We facilitate business and technology collaboration partnerships (including suppliers, distributors and agents) as well as access to European R&D funding including FP7.