Open-Eco-Innovation for SMEs with Pan-European Key Enabling Technology Centres

The KET4CleanProduction partners prepared a scientific publication demonstrating the advantages of the open innovation concept and cooperation among European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), technology centres (TCs) and Enterprise Europe Network members (EENs). The main conclusions are:

• For 68% of the surveyed SMEs, clean and sustainable production is (very) important
• KET TCs are able to support SMEs efficiently regarding clean production
• EENs play an important role in the implementation and management of open-eco-innovation processes
• A pan-European triangular open innovation process has enabled many innovation projects to be completed within 7 months
• Dissemination and communication activities are important to overcome distrust of general open-innovation projects
• An exclusively digital communication leads to difficulties in understanding the technical problems of the SMEs. Personal meetings among SMEs and KET-TCs are very costly but more effective to understanding the problem and proposed a suitable solution.

This publication can be found in the October 2020 edition of the Clean Technology Journal under https://doi.org/10.3390/cleantechnol2040026

Clean Technologies (EISSN 2571-8797) is a peer-reviewed Open Access journal that examines environmentally friendly technologies and improves traditional polluted processes and is published quarterly online by MDPI.