Questions based on M3

• Which services provide highest impact on enablers? (see examples from Brittany and Slovenia)
• Can we optimise the services distribution to improve the enablers' scores? Where to spend additional budgets for highest impacts? Where to
• cut with least negative impacts?
• Are all enablers supported by services? (see examples from Lower Austria and Lower Silesia)
• Is Supply matching Demand?
• Is more detailed analysis needed? (e.g. on sectorial level, segmentation of SME's, … )
• "What if" simulations on various levels (change in policy, intermediaries configurations, services, …)
• Etc.

Example: identifying gaps in innovation support through M3 in Lower Austria

The impact distribution over all innovation enablers in Lower Austria reveals a remaining gap of the Lower Austrian innovation support service portfolio: the support of the firms' structural and organisational development is still under developed, which is very often correlating with the mid or larger sized companies. While the yellow marked innovation enablers "Human Resources" and "Structure and Organisation" show the necessity of further improvements within the Lower Austria innovation support portfolio, the red marked bars "Financial Resources" and "Exploitation of Innovation" (including increasing turnover and profit) will further on remain as weakness in the companies' assessment while seeking for higher turnover and especially higher profit.

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Example: strengths and weaknesses in innovation support through M3 in Brittany

The analyses of M3 scores for Brittany revealed that the following services had a high impact on innovation enablers of firms in the region: Diagnosis, technological interface, R&D/technical activities, financial intermediation.

In contrast the following enablers were only weakly addressed by the innovation support system and need further consideration in policy: anticipation and operational carrying out of industrialisation and commercialisation phases, and internal structuring/organisation

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Example: assessing impacts of services in Slovenia

Work carried out for M3 leads to an interesting finding that the biggest positive changes of individual enablers in the last two years were in the field of Strategy - 81% answers, Information, knowledge and technology - 89% answers and Market orientation and operation - 80% answers, while the smallest progress was shown at Exploitation of innovation, where only 53% of firms noticed important positive changes.

The most successful usage of funds was in Project management; at the 2nd place was Access to information and at the 3rd place Advice. This is in accordance with the study "Innovation Management and the Knowledge - driven Economy", where they concentrated on Innovation Management Techniques (IMTs). Participants in the study found that the main IMTs used were project management (82%), followed by business plan development (67%), corporate intranets (66%) and benchmarking (60%). The smallest success was in the category Technology, if we except Human resources which were not explicitly included in M1.
There is a low level of efficiency of networking/clustering in comparison to project management which shows the highest level of efficiency. An interesting finding is that start-up services had the minimal impact (the lowest score).

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Example: identifying gaps in services in Lower Silesia

For Lower Silesia, at the time of data gathering it was impossible to obtain companies answers on the impact of services since the services have been just delivered in the various projects. Therefore the results for impact scores where obtained partly by questioning companies that participated in the support system earlier that the innovation budget concerned, via questionnaires sent by mail (1000 questionnaires sent), and partly by estimating impact from earlier evaluations during the RIS survey.

Looking at all the types of the services in comparison with the max and mean values (table below), the bigger difference - lower score in opinions of companies from Lower Silesia, is shown under the 'project management', which contains services to support companies over a longer period of time, 'access to finance', 'technology services' and direct finance to support the payment of specialists and investments, which have the highest relative overall impact in other regions.

These services seem to not be available to companies, particularly management of innovation in SME is not offered, and also access to finance concerning innovation as technology credit, capital ventures is seldom used by the companies.

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Example: combining policy objectives and innovation enablers in Limburg

When we combine M1 and M3 into M13 we get an impression of the impact profile of the innovation policy on the enablers.
Activities that support 'enhancement of innovation capacity' have high impact on the enablers 'strategy' and 'structure and organisation' and low impact on 'financial resources' and 'innovation culture'.
Activities that support 'cooperation among firms' have flat and low impact profile but in general such activities reach a high number of companies.
Activities that support 'increase in availability of technology' have highest impact on 'the enabler 'information and technology' as expected.
Activities that support 'creation of NTBF' have a high and flat profile. In Limburg the activities in this category consist of services for providing long term coaching and help, mostly for starting companies, and are categorised under the service 'project management'.
No impact measurements where done for activities supporting the policy objective 'development of international presence'.