Innovation vouchers: 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation
Greenovate! Europe experts design and test new instruments to support eco-innovation in cooperation with the EC and with national and regional innovation agencies.
What we expect from innovation support instruments is that they accelerate eco-innovation.
One instrument that we find particularly well-adapted for SMEs is the so-called “innovation voucher”.
The basic reasoning behind the creation of innovation vouchers is as follows:
- SMEs are the backbone of our economies
- SMEs are under competitive pressure and need to stay state-of-the art, be innovative and reduce costs
- SMEs typically do not have their own R&D base
- SMEs find it complicated to access external knowledge
Access to external knowledge is crucial for SMEs to maintain competitiveness and innovation vouchers were invented to support this. In a nutshell, vouchers are about access to external expertise.
Innovation vouchers first appeared in the European innovation support landscape in 2005, pioneered by the Dutch innovation agency Senter Novem. These vouchers supported technology cooperation between SMEs and research centres. We call them “1st generation vouchers”.
The scheme was taken up by many national and regional innovation agencies across the EU.
Recently, a number of variations have emerged on the voucher model. The impetus here comes from the European Commission’s Europe Innova Programme. This has recently started to focus more on service innovation, and so it encourages the experimentation with service-specific vouchers.
Moreover, it advocates a sector-specific approach to innovation support, as well as access to external business expertise, as opposed to technical expertise.
We have started to call these 2nd generation vouchers, to differentiatate from the earlier model: they can be used with “innovation experts” instead of technical centres.
The support scheme allows SMEs to get advice on their innovation and expansion plans, on their business strategies and on any other innovation initiative they might have, always putting its venture into an international perspective.
Greenovate! Europe experts have been involved in the EC project KIS-PIMS that set up such sector-specific service innovation vouchers and was pioneered by OSEO, TEKES, LEV in 2008.
We think vouchers should offer combined access to technical AND business expertise, and we are calling these 3rd generation vouchers. We are currently testing such schemes in Germany, France and Norway for sustainable construction, and in France, Spain, UK, Germany and Italy for resource efficiency in industrial SMEs. The projects carrying out these tests are GreenConServe and REMake respectively.
Project Outcomes
To read more about the outcomes and experiences from the KIS-PIMS and GreenConServe projects, please download the following brochures:
KIS-PIMS: Guide to Green Innovation vouchers - experiences from testing vouchers for renewable energy service innovators
GreenConServe: Green service innovation vouchers - experiences from testing voucher schemes for sustainable construction service innovators
These give further information on how the voucher schemes were implemented in the participating countries. They also contain case studies describing individual voucher projects, and provide recommendations for future voucher schemes at the European level.