Local Enterprise Office, Donegal County Council is seeking tenders for the provision of service for the Passpartool Project- funded by Interreg Europe

Tender description

The Local Enterprise Office/Donegal County Council along with 7 European Partners is taking part in Passpartool Project an Interreg Europe funded project. The Partners are: • ARTI (Regional Agency for Technology and Innovation, Italy LEAD PARTNER • LIC ( Lithusnisn Innovation Center), Lituania • FUNDECYT–PCTEX (Foundation FUNDECYT Science and Technology Park of Extremadura , Spain • SNN (Northern Netherlands Alliance), Netherland • RARR ( Rzeszow Regional Development Agency), Poland • Regional Council of North Karelia, Finland • The University of Groningen actsas an Advisory Partner. The competitiveness of SMEs and their resilience with respect to the global economic turmoil is strongly linked to their capacity to innovate. However, innovation dynamics aren’t only dependent on R&D and technological change, but often rely on less evident, less formalized and more difficult to assess factors, mainly involving organizational and relational dimensions. This is relevant both for those regions in which medium and low-tech sectors and very small/micro businesses lead the local economy and for those territories with a strong presence of economic sectors related to social innovation, less dependent on formal R&D. The Passpartool project was formed out of a recognized regional and European need to devise new tools and indicators which would allow the Partners to better understand and assess non-R&D-driven innovation dynamics, with a strong emphasis on the direct involvement of the policy beneficiaries in the process of policy design, monitoring and evaluation. The overall project objective is to improve the capability of public policy makers to develop efficient policies to support non-formal, soft and open innovation processed in each of the European partner’s region, with a focus on non-R&D -driven and social innovation.