The overall aim is to ensure that Scottish SMEs with international innovation and growth ambitions are empowered by unlocking their full growth potential through better internal innovation management capability. The underpinning objective of this proposal is therefore to pilot the development of a quality and workable Enterprise Europe Network delivery service in Scotland that supports SMEs to increase their innovation management capacity and to innovate successfully and profitably. This requires not only a focused SME targeting strategy, but also qualified staff trained on appropriate tools and methodologies, delivering the right support to the right SMEs, coordinated with other delivery teams with the Enterprise Europe Network Scotland (EES) host organisations. This proposed pilot project will cover the whole of Scotland, through the two innovation focussed partners of the EES consortium: Scottish Enterprise (SE) and Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE). The majority of the activity will be carried out in the Scottish Enterprise region, which accounts for 91% of the population.

The overall aim is to ensure that Scottish SMEs with international innovation and growth ambitions are empowered by unlocking their full growth potential through better internal innovation management capability. The underpinning objective of this proposal is therefore to deliver a quality service in Scotland that supports SMEs to increase their innovation management capacity and to innovate successfully and profitably. This requires not only a focused SME targeting strategy, but also qualified staff trained on appropriate tools and methodologies, delivering the right support to the right SMEs, coordinated with other delivery teams with the Enterprise Europe Network Scotland (EES) host organisations.

This proposal seeks to investigate the thesis that large numbers of industrial optimisation tasks can be outsourced to rural workers to provide a sustainable source of skilled employment. The project consortium brings together a team of collaborators with the interdisciplinary expertise required to investigate the social, business and technological issues inherent in the vision of "human intelligence" being subcontracted to rural workers from urban manufacturing industry. The goal of the three year program will be to deliver a 'business model' (supported by the performance and economic evidence from a series of trials) that can deliver long term benefits to rural populations. The challenges of delivering this objective range from the social and training issues associated with low literacy rates to the establishment of the performance metrics and pricing models required by the industrial customers. The project consortium of academics, government agency and commercial enterprises brings together a unique combination of skills that range from Crowdsouring and Interactive computer graphics to service innovation and Knowledge Process Outsourcing.

The RIPEET project will support Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) policy experimentations for energy transition in three European territories - in Extremadura (ES), Highlands and Islands of Scotland (UK) and Ostrobothnia (FI). The methodology builds on RRI, transformative innovation, transition management and the Multi-Level-Perspective. RIPEET brings together quintuple helix actors of the territorial socio-technical energy regime in Transition Labs in order to envisage and implement a place-based energy transition process. Building on this evolutionary model of socio-technical transitions, RIPEET will use existing landscape and regime-level pressures to facilitate the development of territorial socio-technical futures based on RRI actions. The governance and agency in this transformative process will be organised within the Transition Labs. These Labs will bring together stakeholders to co-create common visions based on the potentials and priorities of territorial eco-systems (mapping and visioning), generate transition pathways and innovation needs, launching a call for immediate bottom-up solutions to these (pathways and piloting) and anchor the process on organisational as well as policy level (sustainability and exploitation). The framework conditions, processes, and outcomes of these experiments will be mapped, monitored, and evaluated. This constitutes an evidence-base for the revision of sectoral policies, strategies and research and innovation (R&I) instruments as well as for establishing a European RIPEET community. Thereby, RIPEET will support territories in establishing experimental spaces to address the territorial dimensions of the European Green Deal. The consortium consists of 11 renowned and EU-FP-experienced universities, research organisations, SMEs, CSOs, business and innovation centres and regional authorities from seven European countries, with the competences and territorial anchoring necessary to implement the approach.

GreenOffshoreTech aims to support innovation in SMEs and fostering the development of the emerging Blue Economy industries by enabling the emergence of new cross-sectorial and cross-border value chains based on shared challenges and the deployment of key enabling technologies. This will result from the translation of advanced technologies among 8 sectors with strong synergies: offshore wind and other marine renewable energies, offshore and marine aquaculture, offshore oil & gas and waterborne transport, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and environmental technologies. GreenOffshoreTech will facilitate the creation of new products, processes or services with the ambition to make offshore production and transport greener, cleaner and modern towards a resource-efficient economy and EUs Green Deal. GreenOffshoreTech’s consortium will provide a structured framework to implement this innovation action and undertake two kind of activities to support innovation to SMEs directly: 1) Direct financial support to SMEs through a competitive Call of Proposal for innovation projects in relevant topics; and 2) A range of dedicated and tailored Business Support Services to the winner SMEs. In addition, GreenOffshoreTech's consortium will establish an open space, with a mixture of virtual and physical tools, to connect and facilitate collaboration of clusters and SMEs across sectors, regions and countries during and beyond the project. GreenOffshoreTech will support at least 82 SMEs and 82 SMEs innovation projects targeting to develop new innovative products, processes or services. GreenOffshoreTech is a cluster-facilitated project, bringing together 9 of Europe’s leading clusters and SME intermediaries from 15 regions and 7 countries: Norway, Portugal, Latvia, Poland, Iceland, UK (Scotland), Germany. In addition, 1 RTD and 2 SMEs as inter-cluster experts to support the project implementation. The GreenOffshoreTech is highly linked to Regional Smart Specialization Strategies and S3 partnerships.