Use of external expertise (consultancy)

Strategy and Objectives of the EIC Community - Take 1

Hello Team In the light of some older and recent debates about the purpose of the EIC community and its features, I would like to discuss again the overall EIC Community strategy and community features before we decide to make drastic changes (like kill the wiki) or dismiss its usefulness.  All these tools we have in the community, we inherited from a platform (capacity4dev) and have been finetunet and selected based on long experience and a big number of trial and errors. Many more features existed and are not there anymore as they were dropped over time.  Of course we need to streamline the use of these tools to meet specific business objectives for SMEs and of the Commission as the platform serves a different audience, and eventually build new ones.  Nevertheless we should not dismiss the importance of the knowledge component in the context of any capacity development process or programme.  "Business only" or "money is all our beneficiaries ask from us" is not reflecting the reality in many cases, as beneficiaries that have the most potential (be it companies or any other type of beneficiary the Commission has) are also very interested to get more than just money from us.  Typically organisations that have long experience in implemeting programmes and projects like ours, have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and lessons learned on what types of intervention works in which context and what doesn't, a knowledge that unfortunately remains either untapped or not packaged in a way that it can become usefull to beneficiaries. This is the kind of knowledge that really makes a difference for beneficiaries if made availlable in the right way.  The World Bank understood this already in since 1996 actually transforming from a traditional bank into a knowledge bank as they understood that their knowledge was at least as valuable and important as their money was, if not more, for their partners to achieve their objectives.    To my understanding Capacity development / capacity building for SMEs is what the SMEi / EIC programme is all about, and its delivering on this with the Grant and the BAS. I see 3 main pillars of "capacity development" (CD) interventions applied here (this is not a dogma, just an observation that can/ should of course be further improved, refined)

1. Improve SME financial capacity to help it achieve its business objectives: this is the main purpose of the Grant (equity possibly later)
2. Help the SME to find partners (including financial, corporate, procurers, others). This is done through :
   1. Physical Activities including:
      1. pitching and focussed networking events to allow SMEs to meet these potential partners in the best conditions.
      2. Award schemes that allow SMEs to get recognition by peers, experts and potential partners 
   2. Online tools that support networking and partnerships including:
      1. The Company profile: improved as it should be, to reflect the real potential of the SME, including pitching videos, achievements, strengths, objectives, team composition etc 
      2. The future Marketplace, which should allow SMEs to see real needs and challenges of corporates and procurers and allow them to respond to these with real solutions and eventually become solution providers / partners to these.
      3. ScaleUP / Investor matchmaking
      4. Filtered search on company catalogue
      5. Pitching Events online registration  and workflow management
      6. Online support for the award scheme (registration - data collection, assessment, voting, visibility etc) 
3. Help the SMEs get smarter and learn how to best achieve their objectives, overcome their challenges and avoid known pitfalls by using lessons learned, insights and peer learning.
   1. Physical Activities including:
      1. Physical Learning and Training sessions / master classes with very experienced trainers or SMEs that have usefull lesson to share (can be done in a variety of formats and contexts) 
      2. Welcome days (learning what to do and what not to do to make the most of your grant) 
      3. EIC annual events or other events where experiences from other SMEs or high level experts are shared in a variety of  formats (TED style talks, poster sessions etc) 
      4. p2p Coaching activities, where the coach has the experiece and ability to help the SME improve its approach based on own or peer experience 
   2. Online tools that support knowledge sharing and learning including:
      1. Stories, going beyond press release and news becoming knowledge pieces, where SMEs or other stakeholders are sharing real life experience good or bad brought in a way that some lessons can emmerge. Video and backround material are key for this. These can be used to cover also major learnings of events.
      2. Online Webinars and Youtube recordings of the webinars: delivery of high value master classes on high impact topics that are not out there already
      3. Online support to the physical learning / training delivery and consolidation of lessons learned, ressources etc on the subject concerned, mostly through Groups 
      4. Use groups to establish Communities of Practice around specific themes / issues of high concern / high impact for the SMEs (Thematic or Horizontal or combination of both) : Use groups to bring together a critical mass of SMEs and other stakeholders that share a concern, problem or issue that can greatly benefit from peer learning and proffessional support. (see how we build these here)