Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MEVINO (MAKING an EASY and VALUABLE way for INNOVATION WITH PEER LEARNING)

Teaser

In today’s world, increasing speed of technological development and commercial opportunities need new approaches regarding the entrepreneurship ecosystem and keeping up with the global economic-social changes. Within this perspective, supporting innovative entrepreneurship...

Summary

In today’s world, increasing speed of technological development and commercial opportunities need new approaches regarding the entrepreneurship ecosystem and keeping up with the global economic-social changes. Within this perspective, supporting innovative entrepreneurship and young businesses through an efficient delivery of professional support together with public guidance is essential without any argument.
On the other hand, governments, non-governmental institutions and entrepreneurship networks are looking for successful practises, promising policies and good entrepreneurial environment to support and improve entrepreneurs in this field to prevent them from falling back.
In order to fill this gap, within the scope of INNOSUP project ‘MEVINO’ (CSA‐LS 68943), transfer of good practises in partner organizations, the enhancement of existing programmes and establishing new models for intermediaries which give technical support to SMEs are set as goals in our MEVINO (Making and Easy and Valuable Way for Innovation with Peer Learning) project. MEVINO aims at increasing innovative young business activities through delivering proper support for potential entrepreneurs and start-ups. This project realizes it by focusing on peer learning of project partners, implementing successful practises on innovation and entrepreneurship and cooperating in related topics. The expected impact of the project is expanding the successful measures created by this project to the regional level and to the national level later on by meeting regional needs and entrepreneurial deficiencies.
MEVINO project consists of 4 partners:
• Mevlana Kalkınma Ajansı (MEVKA ) from Konya, Turkey
• Fundacion Centro Europeo de Empresas e Innovacion-Albacete (CEEI Albacete) from Castilla-la Mancha, Spain
• Agentziya Za Regionalno Ikonomichesko Razvitie (SZREDA) from Stara Zagora, Bulgaria
• Kompass Zentrum Für Existenzgründungen gGmbH (KOMPASS) from Frankfurt, Germany
Except KOMPASS, 3 of these partner regions generally suffer from the lack of SMEs’ and young businesses’ innovation activities. The fourth partner KOMPASS has a relatively better innovative system compared to other partners. “4+1 Phase Model” and “Guidebook for trainers – Continuing Education for Start-up Consulting by Business Advisors in the Public Sector”, elaborated under the leadership of KOMPASS, are highly acknowledged sample results on international level and already transferred to other regions.
On the first step of the MEVINO project, each partner made a critical analysis of the current situation and related problems are defined by categorizing them under SWOT report. On the second step, according to the findings and the good practises mentioned above, similar successful applications and studies are evaluated within the MEVINO project and improvement measures are created considering the unique qualifications and needs of each partner region. Addition to this, stakeholders for each improvement measure is designated to make the measures more influential and comprehensive. Feasibility checks for most of the measures were also made for testing their applicability.
Overall, the whole project cycle includes this steps:
• Peer review of current service delivery system and entrepreneurial ecosystem
• SWOT documentation of current service delivery system
• Elaboration of Improvement Measures and designating stakeholders
• Feasibility check of the Improvement Measures
• Implementation of the Improvement Measures & Monitoring

Work performed

The project consists of 5 main phases that aim for enhancing innovation and entrepreneurship by peer learning of the project contributors. Peer review of current service delivery system and entrepreneurial ecosystem constitutes the first step of the project. In this step, each partner made a critical analysis of the current situation and relatable problems about the project were noted by classifying. Later, according to the data that was acquired by the analysis, SWOT documentations of the current systems were made and certain issues are prioritized. Thirdly, in order to address and resolve these issues, improvement measures were devised by taking the successful practices of the project partners on similar problems as examples. For this measures; certain groups, institutions or endeavors that are thought to be competent and compatible were designated as stakeholders. With the stakeholders, feasibility studies were done for evaluating the measures’ potential of being successful, dissemination and exploitation. The last step constitutes the implementation of the improvement measures which hasn’t been done at the moment this report was written.
So far, the project hasn’t resulted in any tangible result since it’s still in the development stage. However, the meetings with the stakeholders and the feasibility studies indicate that the improvement measures that are created by peer learning and analyses are needed approaches to the certain problems in each partner’s location. In addition to this; in order to prevent the possible exploitations or mistakes, pilot schemes before final implementation are also planned by the project partners.

Final results

Overall, MEVINO aims at increasing innovation activities of young businesses through a more effective delivery of professional entrepreneurial support for potential entrepreneurs and startups. With the Project, the project partners are planning:
• A better support service for innovation oriented entrepreneurship activities
• More transparent and easier working entrepreneurial mechanisms
• More collaborative and institutions related to innovation and entrepreneurs
• Long-term partnerships between entrepreneurs, public and private bodies.
• Lesser unemployment rates by fostering entrepreneurship

Website & more info

More info: http://www.investinkonya.gov.tr/en/mevka.asp.