TPEB Activities in the H2020 Promotion – Workshop Innovation in the commercial sphere
One of the main pillars of TPEB’s activities is to stimulate innovative project collaboration between the firms and research organizations in the context of the country’s strategic needs. Besides the national R&D&I programs, an emphasis is put on the EU H2020 program, where TPEB has already submitted seven project applications over the last three years. However, in the international comparison the Czech Republic lags behind the comparable countries in the number of applications while the difference is particularly striking when looking at the involvement of the companies in project consortia. In this context, the platform recognizes a need to stimulate innovative project activity also at the level of SMEs that are at the centre of R&D&I support, while recognizing that this trend will be further strengthened in the next budgetary period.
Though TPEB recognizes a relatively decent support provided by the national institutions, this endeavour does not seem to address the main concerns regarding the corporate sector´s involvement in H2020 (general complexity of the programs, administrative burdens, economic disadvantages). Arguably, a potential way of mitigating or even overcoming these concerns might lie in sharing experience with the successful companies that have developed their innovative capacity through international innovative projects. For this reason, TPEB decided to organise the workshop offering experience of the prosperous Czech and foreign companies. As regards the latter, the innovation was accepted by the Head of Innovation of the UK company EXUS that currently runs more than a dozen of FP7 / H2020 projects, while many more successfully completed.
