Mr Andreas Stefanidis Andreas Stefanidis is the former President of the Federation of Hellenic Associations of Young Entrepreneurs - OESYNE, Host organisation of Global Entrepreneurship Network of Greece, President of the nonprofit organisation Academy of Entrepreneurship and Accelerator Director of the first sustainable business incubator in Greece Aephoria.net
Open Platform for Innovative SME’s
Unlocking the innovation capacity for SMEs through Open Innovation
OPENiSME aims to support SMEs in finding qualified scientific experts for their innovation needs, solving the long-standing problem of matching the right skills to the right problem. It is estimated that there are more than 7 million researchers in the world, and every year are published nearly 1 million scientific papers. If you are a SME facing an “innovation problem” it is very likely that there is a researcher somewhere with the skills and knowledge you need. OPENiSME is the tool to find him or her.
OPENISME is a project co-funded by the CIP Programme of the European Union (Grant Agreement no. 621121), designed to help unlock the innovation capacity for smaller firms that aspire to grow, through the facilitation of new “Open Innovation” partnerships.
OPENISME will primarily focus on partnerships between SMEs and research institutions which are able to contribute novel resources, expertise or insights, as this represents a massive yet underexploited opportunity.
Through increased automation, the innovative partner matching technology at the heart of the OPENISME platform can significantly extend the reach of SME’s, returning the expertise most appropriate and able to respond to specific business challenges.
In the second stage OPENISME will also investigate the utility of the techniques developed to other forms of partnerships that underpin effective innovation, including SME relationships with complementary private sector organisations.
Typical use-cases start with an SME seeking to solve a business problem but not having the skills, time or money to come up with a solution. In the first stage of the project the Open Innovation Platform will harness automated matching through a concierge service to assist SMEs.
Having demonstrated the utility of data driven partner matching in this use-case the project will investigate other contexts where automated expertise discovery can assist the pace and reach of SME partnering activities.