The use of voucher schemes to implement open innovation strategies: the 4helix+ case study

In a world where economic blocks dispute the supremacy in innovation, policies that prove to be effective in fostering innovation in a sector and/or region can be extremely valuable. Innovation has been generally seen to be at the heart of economic development and growth. It has also been at the heart of entrepreneurial activity. The garage-based entrepreneur who turns inventions into marketable innovations is a major part of the entrepreneurial dream/myth that has overcome pop culture and business media. However the very nature of how companies and even societies produce innovation has been changing away from the “Doc Emmett Brown” stereotype (in the Back to the Future movies) and to an open innovation environment where businesses find solutions to problems with the help of outside agents (Birkinshaw, Hamel, & Mol, 2008; Petzold, Landinez, & Baaken, 2019). The helices approach has been proposed in the literature (Elias G Carayannis et al., 2016; Elias G Carayannis, Dc, & Campbell, 2009) and clearly supported by the European Union in the calls it opens to fund interterritorial cooperation projects. The Interreg Med 4helix+ is a pilot project that set out to prove the value of such a policy in the Blue Growth sector and it was designed to help 48 startups from 8 Mediterranean regions implement simple innovation projects with the help of actors from the other helices. It took place between 2018 and 2020 and included eight different pilot regions: Lisboa in Portugal, Seville and Barcelona in Spain, Marseille in France, Ancona in Italy, Tirana in Albania, Zadar in Croatia and Thessaloniki in Greece. In each of these regions, six 10 thousand-euro(€10k) vouchers were attributed to innovation projects in the Blue Growth sector, in a total of 48 vouchers and a €480.000 investment. These vouchers were attributedto projects submitted by partnerships of one Blue Growth SME and one Knowledge Provider (KP) fromeither the Cultural Creative Industry or from other research facilities. The 48 projects came from a wide range of subsectors and contracted very diverse list of services to implement innovative ideas. However, there was larger number of SMEs from the coastal and maritime tourism subsector and a larger number of KPs that delivered new product development services. The participating SMEs claimed to be facing important challenges in the areas of market research, new product development and web site and mobile development. On the other hand, they showed really high expectations about the vouchers in the early days of the process, even if SMEs with previous experiences with EU funds showed slightly lower expectations. In the end, all projects were completed, and the satisfaction of all participants was later analyzed. The results of this pilot project are then discussed on the grounds of how to best communicate and involve citizens in Cohesion Policy.