InNow

Innovation is changing, and large companies increasingly acknowledge the fact that start-ups and small companies, especially in digital and technology businesses, are disrupting whole industries from bottom up. There are immense opportunities for cooperation between start-ups, SMEs and large companies that could result in mutual synergies and an increased number of innovative solutions and products.

The InNow project will foster such win-win cooperation in the clean technology sector which has a huge growth potential. The partnership will design an innovation support framework that consists of three programmes, each targeted at a certain maturity and size of relevant companies. 

The “Business Support Programme” targets start-ups and SMEs, enabling them to partner up with the large companies. The “Innovation Support Programme” increases awareness of large companies and designs events for cooperation and the “Matchmaking Acceleration Programme” introduces tailor-made open innovation practices between large companies, fitting start-ups and SMEs. These support programmes will be piloted in around 200 clean-tech start-ups, SMEs and five large companies in the participating countries. The tested framework will then be open for transfer to other business support organisations in central Europe and the EU.