nowEurope

The centrope_tt team has just published a comprehensive map of R&D institutions, which provides the location and further details of more than 2,200 R&D facilities in the CENTROPE region. My organization, Pannon Business Network, took part in building this map.

With the quick search function, you can find easily who is who in R&D in Centrope. As I mentioned in a previous post, the centrope_tt international voucher system awards 50 fortunate companies up to € 5,000 worth of research service, at no cost. This call will be published some time before summer 2010, so stay tuned, Meanwhile, use the R&D Map to located your potential partners, and let me know what you think in the comments!

A central goal of the CITT project (under which nowEurope is financed) is to work out strategies to improve technology transfer between the business and research communities within the Centrope region.

However, a larger issue throughout the European Union is increasing the cross-border business activities of SMEs. Euractiv writes:

[M]ore than 99% of EU companies are small and medium-sized enterprises with no more than 250 employees and a maximum turnover of €50 million. However, only 8% of them engage in cross-border trade and just 5% have subsidiaries or joint ventures abroad, according to the European Commission.

According to experts, the key barrier is differing tax regimes.

Continue reading ‘Tax issues the main barrier to cross-border SME business in Europe’

One of the challenges of running a blog – especially one written by a team of collaborators – is to ensure the ‘right’ editorial focus. About a year ago, Vlastimil Vesely and I decided to provide regular feedback to our circle of contributors by asking them to vote each month for the two best articles published to nowEurope in the preceding month.

The result of this vote is the ‘featured posts’ block displayed on the right-hand column of this page. This is intended as an aid for you, the reader, to find the best content posted at nowEurope. However, Vlastimil and I got to talking and we realized it might be a good idea to publicly highlight some of these posts, and describe why they were chosen.

Continue reading ‘Best of blog: what is our editorial focus?’

A few days ago the Calypso initiative published a blog post and link about my recent nowEurope article address addressing technology transfer and FP7. Calypso specialises in helping organisations to participate in FP7 projects. Their blog deals with similar topics and questions as nowEurope, which got me to thinking about a handful of European initiatives that resemble our project, CITT.

Continue reading ‘A little peek over CITT’s fence’

Recently I read in the Austrian newspaper “Der Standard“ an article investigating if there are enough IT professionals available for Austrian companies. The journalist, Gregor Kucera, interviewed several opinion leaders from the chamber of commerce, social union, leading IT companies and drew the following picture of the future.

At the moment there are enough IT professionals available to fill most job offers because of the economic crisis. The problem will come in about 10 years. Before the dotcom bubble a lot of young people wanted to become IT professionals because of the high salaries. These have dropped in the recent years and are currently only little above other branches. As a consequence less and less young people want to go into that direction.

Do you have similar prognosis in your region? Or is it different?

After sharing my experiences about what I call “hard core“ technology transfer I would also like to discuss with you two other forms of technology transfer that are working quite fine in my business environment:

1) Joint projects with research centers/universities

2) Hiring employees from universities/research centers

A very effective way for my company to gain new expertise has been to work jointly with research centers and/or universities. In all cases this has been a very fruitful cooperation, as on the one hand the RTD institution received hands-on market knowledge and on the other hand we received first class technological expertise.

As the next step I hired even employees of this research group if I planned research and innovation within our company over a longer period.

For my small company these approaches worked out very successfully. Do you have similar experiences? What is your opinion?

One of the key output of the CITT project was the survey conducted among the top Centrope ICT companies and university institutions. Our team at FIRST Innovation Park approached over 50 premium ICT companies in South Moravia and received 34 answered questioannaires. Let’s look at one of the questions – what are the main barriers for your cooperation with academic research?

Several companies mentioned university departments concentrated too much on theoretic approaches and the fundamental research, having only few researchers with practical experience and little trust in commercial activities. They also lack stronger discipline and training for real-life situations at students.

Our respondents often quoted very complex and hardly usable legislation for sharing experiences & research results and problems with the intellectual property protection. They reported a missing concept for technology transfer, insufficient rules and decision making process taking too long at the university side.
Continue reading ‘Main barriers for cooperation with academic research’

In his post, Vlastimil Vesely introduced the innovation voucher system of South Moravia. We at Pannon Business Network are working on a project called centrope_tt, where we are responsible for the development of a system for supporting innovation and cross border technology transfer between SMEs and R&D institutions in the Centrope region.

The main characteristics of the centrope_tt voucher:

• while national programmes support innovation on national and regional level, centrope_tt supports technology transfer on interregional level
• Any SME in Centrope can apply for one of the 50 pilot vouchers and use the voucher for services of one of the universities located in a foreign Centrope country
• In 2010, 50 pilot vouchers are available: 20 in Austria, 10 in the Czech Republic, 10 in Hungary and 10 in Slovakia.
• The maximum value of one voucher is € 5,000.
• The financed activities are similar to other innovation voucher systems.

Currently the consortium is working on the preparation of the voucher system. (public call, implementation manual, trilateral contracts etc.)

When the official call is ready we will publish it on this site, too. Until then please collect your ideas and find your international partners for your project!

I would like to use the occasion and respond to Günther’s remark on the phenomenon that everyone talks about technology transfer (“TT”), but still it is hard to find results.

Günther writes that actually TT is “NOT an issue – at least if one googles the term and looks at the results (…) surely there’s a lot of institutions promoting it, and the EC funds projects …”.

Being familiar with the EU policy and the focus of FP7 and other funding programmes, one could argue that public institutions really do promote technology transfer. I am sure technology transfer is indeed an issue. I guess the people actually DOING technology transfer only have a different understanding about it, they have different perspectives than the people TALKING about TT. Last, but not least, they do not publish their projects using terms of technology transfer etc.

So as Günther says it is probably just a matter of (non) marketing: “Universities are still very reluctant to publish about themselves, success stories are rare, and companies do not consider such news worth while publishing”. Anyway, marketing is not the only problem, there are of course always reasons and possibilities to improve things. Continue reading ‘Technology Transfer and FP7′