OPENISME (Open Innovation Platform for Innovative SMEs – www.openisme.eu), co-funded project by the CIP Programme of the European Union, helps SMEs in finding qualified scientific experts for their innovation needs, solving the long-standing problem of matching the right skills to the right problem. Many SMEs from participating project partners’ countries started to use external knowledge through OPENISME in order to improve their innovation success and they already created success stories.
The project consists of 9 partners from Italy, Turkey, France, UK, Greece, Slovenia and Germany and from the beginning of the project, the partners provide the SMEs in their country with free consultancy services to get benefit from the OPENISME Platform. In this respect, R&D problems of the SMEs are defined and the experts skilled on the very specific topic of interest for the SMEs are found and then matched with the SMEs. The project partners presented some success stories of open innovation for SMEs in the one-day conference on “open innovation” and “blue growth” organized by AKEP (Academy of Entrepreneurship, the Greek Partner) in Greece on the 6th of December, 2016.
The event started with the opening speech of the representative from Economy and Development of Ministry in Greece and continued with the other speakers such as Mayor of Piraeus, Vice president of Piraeus University of Applied Science, President Piraeus Chamber of Commerce and Industry, President of Piraeus Chamber of Crafts and President of Academy of Entrepreneurship. OPENISME Project Coordinator, Dr. Anilkumar Dave (t2i) gave a keynote speech on open innovation and Dr. Jean-Louis Lievin (Idexlab) made a presentation about the role of ICT in innovation. The other partners of the project, LMT, Fulda University, TAGES, AKEP, JSI, UCL and Vision 2020, presented their success stories on OPENISME.
Aslihan Kagnici, Projects Consultant of TAGES (Turkish partner of the Project), presented a success story about a Turkish SME named Verbasis which is an R&D and software SME mainly focused on NLP, computer aided translation tools, machine translation and intelligent applications. Verbasis was looking for experts qualified on computer aided translation tools for their innovative project idea. Through the OPENISME Platform, the relevant experts were found and contacted by TAGES and then matched to Verbasis. After several discussions, happily Verbasis and the expert, who has the right skills according to the needs of Verbasis, decided to develop the project idea together. Aslihan Kagnici also shared the benefits of OPENISME from the perspective of Turkish SMEs as follows:
- Easy access to all scientific papers and patents from a single platform
- Searching with the right keywords in terms of the semantic suggestions
- Very useful tool for literature reviews
- Very useful tool to learn about the latest technologies in the specific areas
- Easy access to experts’ details for communication
- Getting supports from intermediaries to match with the right experts