About the project
Our Mission
DepoSIt is a 24 months Coordination and support Action established with the aim to develop and test European Innovation Audit tool for Social Innovation. Deposit will bring the Social innovation concept closer to the SME’s and Innovation Agencies.
DepoSIt Project is driven by the significance of interrelations between the enhancement of innovation capacities of the SMEs and inclusion of the Social Innovations in this process, in order to facilitate the future economic developments of the companies.
Thus, DepoSIt Project objective is to develop and test a significantly improved Innovation Audit tool by applying so far modestly used methodology for the Policy experimentation – Randomised Control Trials (RCTs), providing in this way innovation support for the SME sector and allowing simultaneously direct impact assessment of the newly designed Innovation support scheme.
The improved Innovation Audit tool will combine the standard techniques for boosting the innovation capacities and additional measures for identification and fostering of Social Innovation potentials of SMEs.
More in detail DepoSIt aims to:
- Develop, test (and validate) significantly improved Innovation Audit tool, to boost the exploitation of the innovation potentials with the inclusion of Social Innovation aspects
- Apply Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) in a real environment (by delivering service to SMEs) as a method for testing the effectiveness of the developed Innovation support scheme
- Helping innovation-driven SMEs to better recognise market opportunities, understand competing innovative solutions but also foster exploitation of their Social Innovation capacities
- Serve a as best practice example and encourage other Innovation agencies to perform policy experimentations and related upscaling of the tested schemes
Methodology
DepoSIt is characterized by the development of improved innovation support scheme for SMEs – Innovation audit tool for Social Innovation as well as by the implementation (testing) of the tool followed by the effectiveness assessment during the project’s timeframe. Furthermore, the project activities are including capacity building, promotional and outreach actions – within and outside of the consortium. These activities are not only aimed to increase the awareness of importance of the testing of newly developed/improved innovation support schemes for SMEs and give the incentives to Innovation Agencies to involve their self’s in policy experimentations more actively, but also to create an added value for SMEs by increasing the competitiveness of Social Innovation on the European market.
- DepoSIt will address two focal aspects in order to achieve the Project objectives:
- Policy experimentation and related outcome assessment – designing, testing (by the application of the Randomised Control Trials) and results assessing of the Innovation Audit tool for the Social Innovation
- Capacity building and incentives for Innovation Agencies – perform a set of activities in- and out-side of the DepoSIt Consortium to assure and facilitate the future Policy experimentation by the Innovation agencies.
Work packages
The overall structure of the DepoSIt is divided into 6 Work Packages (WPs) which will be implemented through the 24 months of the project’s duration. The WPs aim at receiving the impacts foreseen within the project and are as follow:
