Acciones de Documento

IDEA (2020)

IDEA (2020)  Supporting tools and training to support multidisciplinary IDEAtion processes for innovation

Project Title:Supporting tools and training to support multidisciplinary IDEAtion processes for innovation
Acronym: IDEA
Organisation: Universidad de Extremadura
Address: Avenida de Elvas s/n , 06006 Badajoz (España) ES
Website: www.unex.es
Identifier: 2020-1-ES01-KA227-ADU-096094
Programme: Erasmus+
Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices
Action Type: Partnerships for Creativity
Start Date: Mar 1, 2021
End Date: Feb 28, 2023
EC Contribution: 167,634 EUR
Partners: E&D KNOWLEDGE CONSULTING, LDA (PT) , DANMAR COMPUTERS SP ZOO (PL) , CONSORZIO MATERAHUB INDUSTRIE CULTURALI E CREATIVE (IT) , Asociación Valencia Inno Hub (ES)
Topics: Creativity and culture ; Cooperation between educational institutions and business ; Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship)
Summary:

There is a multiplicity of ideation techniques and tools available, to enhance SMEs creation, innovativeness, performance and product development. However, these tools and techniques remain either unknown to majority of SMEs or, in ideation and its importance for growth and innovation aware SMEs, not implemented as a structured process. In vast majority of SMEs the responsibility for generating ideas and starting the innovation process is still attributed and/or controlled by top management (Fernández-Esquinas et al 2017) creating a barrier for the engagement of all staff or external partners in the process. Innovation is established for many years as a key to growth, sustainability and competitiveness of companies. But the current COVID-19 pandemic situation has highlighted even more its importance. The unexpected unprecedented situation has challenged all companies and professionals to outstretch their resilience and innovation skills to survive. While many struggled to survive the economic impact caused by the pandemic, some firms shown their ability to become creative and innovate, adjusting processes and relocating resources to deliver new products highly responsive to new conditions. However, majority of companies has been struggling with the need to adjust to the new global situation. In this scope, the creative sector was one of the most affected sectors with a drastic reduction of its activities and a huge economic impact. But while the pandemic has spotlighted the general lack of flexibility and readiness of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to react fast, it also increased the openness to innovation and cross-sectoral collaborations and opportunity to improve innovation processes and culture inside companies. In this context, IDEA project proposes a new solution to tackle the opportunity created, by providing new tools and development path to support companies to develop new solution through ideation processes. The process is to be further enhanced by a close collaboration between traditional and creative SMEs and startups as a way to increase the quality of the ideas for innovation developed and to reduce the existing gap between companies from these sectors. By joining SMEs, startups and creative industry all will benefit from multitude of visions and approaches and cross sectoral collaborations that will unlock new sustainability opportunities for all. Thus, the project aims to develop a new tool to support innovation, creativity and collaborations as a mean to growth, sustainability and resilience under unexpected situations. Under IDEA project, gathering 5 organizations from 4 different countries, 3 intellectual outputs will be developed: O1. Innovation, creativity and multidisciplinary collaboration - Awareness and engagement methodology; O2 - Online platform, where participants will find a learning and practical path to implement ideation techniques with opportunity for collaboration between participant traditional and creative SMEs; O3 - Learned lessons and recommendations guide, which aims to support the future adoption of the solution based on the learning and experience gathered by the partnership and a set of recommendations for the implementation of the outputs in different contexts. With the IDEA project, the partnership aims to deliver a solution to support SMEs to become more innovative and be more prepared to face the challenges and obstacles of unexpected and risky global situations like the currently COVID-19 pandemia.

Erasmus+ Project Results Platform IDEA