Business

UK CEED and Opportunity Peterborough host European Summit on innovation funding

UK CEED and Opportunity Peterborough hosted the second InnoFun Working Summit on 6-8 March 2013 to discuss new approaches on how to “innovate the innovation funding”. InnoFun is a European project aiming at improving regional policies concerning innovation funding. The ultimate goal is to make the selection criteria more flexible and reduce the communication gap between innovation and finance, market and people

Last week’s InnoFun Working Summit discussed new innovation funding approaches by looking at case studies from the different project partner countries. Each project partner engaged with funding bodies in their home country to discuss ways in which funding for innovation ideas can be made easier and more efficient. Each representative pitched his/her regional expertise, capacities, measures and ideas to the participants to show how innovative their country’s way of funding is and to determine what challenges they faced.

Concluding the second phase of the project at the Summit in Peterborough, the project partners discussed best practices and useful instruments in cooperation with regional stakeholders. These emerged after a series of regional and national stakeholder meetings. Regional and national stakeholders from public and private funding schemes, from academia and businesses were invited to technical talks to share and develop ideas with the project team with relation to planned improvement of policies and methodologies. The expected outcome of these talks is to make the access to information easier and to speed up the funding of innovative ideas.

In order to kick-off Phase 3 of the project, working groups were formed in several areas: Improvement of “decision processes in funding schemes”, improvement of “start-up – investor matching via digital tools”, improvements of “methodologies to bring innovation to society via digital storytelling”, i.e. simplify the communication between innovation and society.

In the next stages of the project, policies and methodologies in co-operation with the respective experts will be designed in order to formulate specific targets for pilot actions. These pilot actions will improve regional policies on innovation funding and methodologies that will aid the translation of innovation to finance/market/people.

Working Summit 3 will be held in Cyprus and the purpose will be to present the working groups’ results, formulate pilot actions at the regional level, and plan field missions.

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