The EC has underlined that EU countries have done much to foster knowledge transfer and sharing, also modifying laws and taking new guidelines, but they have limited themselves to acting merely on a national scale. The IKTIMED project promotes an innovative integrated approach for the MED area aimed at improving the openness of the Mediterranean territories’ innovation systems, through the setting-up of new modalities of cooperation among research centers, the public sector and enterprises. The approach is to foster a new way to sustain innovation, through an open, more dynamic MED model of innovation, in which companies can see both “inside-out” and “outside-in”, considering that innovation is ever more based on knowledge of external assets. Cooperation is a way to generate new ideas and bring them quickly to market.
Project's general objectives are:
- foster the transnational dimension of knowledge transfer in the MED area considering innovation as a more open process;
- achieve the cutting down of knowledge and technology market's fragmentation in the MED area;
- improve the open innovation approach on research and academic institution;
- increase the relations between the economic sector and science specialization centers of MED programme area;
- improve the attractiveness of local Mediterranean territories with innovation-oriented goals;
- improve the connection between R&D, innovation and regional public policy priorities;
- stimulate knowledge and innovation on a global context for intermediaries organization on technology transfer, by matching ideas, knowledge, linkages and networks.
The main activities were: a) innovation providers' quality accreditation system; and b) analysis of existent public-private mechanisms of cooperation to fund innovation as pre-commercial procurement of R&D services in which companies develop new solutions for public sector needs, due to the current lack of a commercially stable solution.
Other main component was the setting-up of collaborative groups such as knowledge communities. These communities aimed to include business people, researchers, technologists, as well as academics who are flexible, mobile and eager to innovate in a specific sector, which will permit to boost the creation of relevant aggregation focus on sectors with an own well defined developing plan.
URL: www.iktimed.eu