engleski

EU R&D funding as a way of incentivising innovation of SMEs: Review of impacts

The main idea behind this paper is to review and discuss the impacts of SMEs participation in EU R&D programmes as a way of boosting their innovation activities. The paper is concerned with several research questions which will help us to present an overview of the results on the effects of increased availability of EU R&D funding on boosting innovation activities of SMEs across the EU. We start with examining the current position of EU SMEs innovation performance by providing snapshot on selected descriptive statistics and indicators. After that, we turn to elaborating empirical and theoretical foundations and rationale for increased public funding through the EU R&D programmes targeted to SMEs. Then we focus especially to discuss the impact of FP7, CIP, Eurostars and Horizon 2020 programmes funding on SMEs recipients. We briefly survey the results of available empirical studies that used both quantitative and qualitative evidence and examine their outcomes which speak of direct and indirect impacts on innovation activities in SMEs in EU member states. The examined empirical evidence points towards several positive effects of participation in EU R&D Programmes on incentivising innovation activities, output and performance of recipient SMEs.

SMEs, innovation, R&D, competitiveness, EU R&D funding

This paper is based on the research done by the authors for the H2020 project „Investigating the impact of the Innovation Union –I3U“, financed by the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 645884).