SME participation in research grant consortia—the emergence of coordinated attention in collaborative innovation

Abstract

influences priority setting. In this paper, we study attention coordination among SMEs and their partners for the emergence of priorities in joint research grant proposals. Applying content analysis to 207 grant proposals of innovation consortia that have received funding in the EU's Horizon 2020 program, we find that increasingly diverse consortia shift attention away from technological novelty and market creation towards more consideration for the innovation ecosystem.Plain English Summary SMEs in publicly funded research consortia often benefit from the diversity of partners but diversity also influences how partners write up the grant proposal. They put more emphasis on embeddedness in the ecosystem but less on technological novelty. SMEs often collaborate with organizations of different institutional backgrounds, such as other firms, universities, or research organizations, in publicly funded innovation projects. While these collaborations are often beneficial, SMEs need to coordinate with their project partners about how to set priorities in the grant proposal. Our analysis, which is based on the proposal texts of 207 EU-funded research consortia, reveals that increasingly diverse consortia put more emphasis on the embeddedness into an innovation ecosystem but less on achieving technological novelty. Our research has implications for SMEs that seek to collaborate for innovation and Abstract Research funding organizations routinely encourage SMEs to collaborate with organizations of different institutional backgrounds, such as other firms, universities, or research organizations. These collaborations are supposed to involve SMEs in knowledge flows across boundaries and generate innovative solutions to complex problems. However, we know little about how the project partners determine the priorities of their joint research in the first place and how the institutional composition

Activities and Outputs from SME and MNC Collaboration on R&I Projects

“…A statement from one interviewed MNC showed that the R&I collaboration helped them to better communicate their 5G technology to potential clients and improved the design of the business model to supply these clients with the technology going forward. The findings with respect to SMEs is in line with the findings of Grimpe et al [19] regarding SMEs' focus on technological novelty, i.e., explicit innovation goals with their participation in R&I consortia.…”

“…Reduced cost through shared spending on innovation and reference customer effects are also beneficial for SMEs [4]. MNCs' intentions to access funding is somewhat new, as the motivation behind R&I collaboration has usually been to monitor trajectories of different technologies and as a networking platform to widen their technological horizon [19]. The basis for this could be that the respondents represented R&I-related units from these MNCs, i.e., when the company budget allocated to R&I declines, searching for funding from other sources is necessary.…”

“…Grimpe et al [19] studied innovation action project proposals with SME participation funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program. These project consortiums are similar to 5G-SOLUTIONS in that they involve large firms, universities and research institutions, public bodies and non-governmental organizations.…”

Emerging best strategies and capabilities for university–industry cooperation: opportunities for MSMEs and universities to improve collaboration. A literature review 2000–2023

“…1. Conducting joint R&D, including agreements on cooperation between universities and businesses to implement joint research activities, regardless of the funding source (Grimpe et al, 2021). 2.…”

R&D cooperation and innovation networks: lessons from SME participation in H2020

“…Different entities may pursue different goals, preferring specific kinds of R&D outputs over others. Commercial products as R&D outputs are more valued by SMEs (Luukkonen, 2002) than HEIs (Grimpe et al, 2022). SMEs are more market-driven than research-driven (Hervás-Oliver et al, 2021).…”