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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VirCoin2SME (Social, complementary or community virtual currencies transfer of knowledge to SME: a new era for competitiveness and entrepreneurship)

Teaser

Summary

The idea of Vircoin2SME project is to support the social, complementary or community virtual currencies transfer of knowledge to SME contributing with a new era for competitiveness and entrepreneurship.

With a collaborative working scheme, all Vircoin2SME partners have been involved in secondments, both sending and receiving staff in secondments. Even if all the scientific objectives, deliverables and milestones have been fully achieved, the secondment objectives have been partly achieved with some deviation in terms of the implemented secondment months.

The objectives have been achieved by implementing a collaborative working scheme where research entities have been designed the methodology and elaborate final guidelines to develop, according to the actual business scenarios defined and analysed by the private companies involved in VirCoin2SME, in the two respective sectors that will act as use cases for study and proposals development: healthcare and tourism which are very important topics for the society. The overall objectives were the following:
1. To compare different models of social networks influence on business processes
2. To analyse the mechanisms behind the adoption of social, complementary or community virtual currencies.
3. To research on the potential impact of digital innovation and alternative currencies development in social, environmental and economic sustainability.
4. To develop two sector-oriented proposals/guidelines (healthcare and tourism) for developing sustainable business models based on the use of complementary and/or virtual currencies

Work performed

Work Package 1: Project Management
UdG, as the coordinator, established the structure for making decisions. Informed with D1.2 Project manual about all project milestones, ongoing tasks, deliverables and resource utilization. Managed his own financial budget and transferred the proportional part to the rest of the partners. Prepared the main structure of both progress reports. Adhered the intellectual property rules. The rest of the partners followed the Project manual delivered by the coordinator, managed his own financial budget and justified their secondments. Adhered the intellectual property rules.

Work package 2: Research Activities
UNAB was the leader of social currencies task finding common research interest and developing new research lines in social currencies with all partners collaboration proposed new schemes that were used and were analysed.

Work package 3: Training and Networking
All partners contributed with the Guidelines/Proposals report development in order to try to envisage new commercial applications and business opportunities in different sectors and countries, bringing together all knowledge and experiences collected through VirCoin2SME.

Work package 4: Communication and Dissemination
Easyi prepared the project plan and communication agreement, coordinated the events report and collected all trainings and events where all partners participated. All partners participated in different dissemination events and supported the final events organization.

Main results are the following:

Secondments
- Three or four months are very short time for internships. More time is needed to develop and to finish a project. The benefits are obtained in the future and sometimes the secondment can not see the product.
- It is important the guidance of the professional tutor as a key success factor for the secondments, on the company the guidance is done day to day , not by reports.
- Foreign researchers are more motivated than locals and some places are more motivating, however research secondees have to invest their time in their current tasks, it makes that it is difficult to achieve succesfully all projects results planned . The communication skills in English are important, however it is not enough and it is important to know the cultural and some language features.

Competences
- It is possible to train competences during the secondments, transferable and specific ones.
- It is necessary that at the research trains not only to acquire knowledge but also competences.
- There are different meanings for competences (relationship between knowledge-skills â€“competences).
- Competences are the use of knowledge.
- Added value of Vircoin2SME related to other international internships: training competences, transversal competences and monitoring (academic and professional tutors).

Bridging the gap between universities and companies
- The base learned at the university is useful to work at the company.
- Communication between universities and companies are very important to share the goals of the internship, the priorities, the level of competences required and the level of improvement that are expected to be - achieved. Also the research that has been developed in both sides. Working together.
- It is important to adapt Human Resources company policies to benefit from internships.

Final results

Short-term impact targets
The target groups of Vircoin2SME were identified and project results address their needs in the following way:
1) Research Institutions benefits
-Starting new model of relationship with business.
-Enrichment of their own teaching point of view through participation in learning by doing processes about competence based learning.
-Major connection between academic tasks and social and business needs.
-Making an internal context in which professors do not participating in the project can see the life of it and their benefits (internal dissemination)

2) Business benefits
-Experience taking part in virtual currencies research
-Formally description of their own needs in order to help research institutions to better answer it.

3) Secondments benefits
Secondees have the benefit of knowing other institutions, a new model of exchange, based on new study case and new opportunities of development.

After the project is finished the target groups were reached in the following way:
1) Academia benefits
- New and lasting research collaborations resulting from the intersectoral and/or international secondments and the networking activities implemented.
- Self-sustainability of the partnership after the end of the project.
- Contribution of the project to the improvement of the research and innovation potential within Europe and/or worldwide.
- Effectiveness of the proposed measures for communication and results dissemination
- New real contacts for future projects and innovations.

2) Business
- Formal contact with academia oriented to complement their knowledge and research.
- Communication channel to get better innovation and research staff.
- Solution for all the concrete project/ideas developed during the global project. (real solutions performed).

3) Secondments benefits
- New set of acquired competences.
- Contacts in new contexts and countries.
- Experience in solving real problems.