2004-2006 Scottish Innovative Actions Programme

Scotland's innovation support system was given a significant boost with the award of £2 million from the European Regional Development Fund for an Innovative Actions Programme.

The Innovative Actions Programme formed an integral part of the EU's strategy on stimulating innovation in business. Scotland benefited from accessing a network of similar expertise and related knowledge operating across 156 regions throughout Europe, each with the stated aim of stimulating and improving the delivery of innovation and entrepreneurship support systems.

The Programme offered an opportunity to experiment and pilot innovative and creative ideas. Operating Scotland-wide it made a major contribution towards the improvement of the Scottish innovation support system.

One of the Programme's key features was that it took the lead in forming a development partnership involving the Scottish Executive, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands & Islands Enterprise and other key organisations (including representatives from higher education and the private sector). The partnership delivered a small number of high quality pilot projects from this additional funding.

Projects funded under this Programme were delivered by partner organisations involved in the mechanisms of delivering innovation support services to small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) across Scotland.

In Scotland, the Programme concentrated on supporting innovative pilot projects in four key strategic areas:

• the Scottish innovation system – exploring new systems based approaches towards innovation in Scotland and systems mapping
• SME demand for innovation – exploring business attitudes to innovation and research and development; and piloting new interventions to stimulate demand within SMEs
• knowledge access, flows and management – exploring SME access to knowledge and learning, knowledge flows and how Scottish SMEs manage and exploit knowledge to improve growth and competitiveness
• marketing and product launch – exploring the mechanisms of how Scottish SMEs create new markets and seek to turn innovation into value.

Another important feature of this Programme was its emphasis on networking across other regions. It provided the facility to disseminate the findings from pilot projects carried out in Scotland to the other regions in Europe operating Innovative Actions Programmes. This means that innovative ideas and new innovation support mechanisms that have been successful elsewhere in the Europe could be introduced to Scotland.