The Lessons we Learnt

• Empowering SME to think strategically about innovation, and their own business innovation is key to mobilising them to engage in long-term and self-defined RTD activities.
  
  
• Faced with the complexities of international RTD collaborations, SME usually need the assistance of professionally equipped, empowered coaches. Such coaches for cooperation need to speak the language of the SME and therefore to build all their support around value creation through business innovation.
  
  
• While many SMEs have become reluctant to receive professional consultancy, they tend to be very open for client centred coaching. Openly sharing knowledge and network resources with the company is a central part of the value provided by the coach.

• As coaching to promote cooperation and business innovation constitutes only one part of an overall innovation system, the smE-MPOWER approach needs to be structurally integrated into existing regional support frameworks. If it is, it bears the potential to empower the regions towards the goals of the European knowledge economy.