On Monday, 12th April 2021, Design & Crafts Council Ireland held its 8th Local Stakeholder Group Meeting online as part of the CRAFTS CODE project. These meetings includes representatives from third level institutions, Local Enterprise Offices, craft SMEs, the Southern Regional Assembly, Enterprise Ireland, DCCI and more. The aim of these meetings is to bring together different thoughts and ideas and programmes and schemes that can be filtered into 'good practices' that are shared with the project partners in other countries.
The 'good practices' being researched now, revolve around the theme 'How to innovate the craft sector'. This is a broad topic, and open to several different interpretations. In our last stakeholder meeting, the group were introduced to the '2020 Innovate' programme. 2020 Innovate is a programme designed with the business in mind to help build a pathway to access support, re-assess the business and develop innovative strategies for adapting to new market opportunities and challenges. The programme brings participants through a disciplined framework to discover and analyse where the innovation potential lies in their enterprise and how they can capitalise on those opportunities to strive for growth. Aimed at established businesses (trading on average 3 years+), with between 3 – 50 employees, 2020 Innovate will help take an enterprise to the next level by delivering sophisticated breakthrough innovations. Two craftspeople joined this meeting, Eric McGuire (McGuire Diamonds) and Alison Power (Mohu Designs) to explain what the benefits of the programme had been to them.
In this meeting, we heard from Mike Dolan (Enterprise Ireland) about the Innovation Voucher. The Innovation Voucher initiative was developed to build links between Ireland's public Knowledge Providers (i.e. higher education institutes, public research bodies) and small businesses. Innovation Vouchers worth €5,000 are available to assist a company or companies to explore a business opportunity or problem with a registered knowledge provider.
In an independent survey of companies that participated in the Innovation Voucher Programme:
- 97% of respondents would be willing to recommend the Programme to other businesses.
- Increase in company turnover of €11.83 per €1.00 of Enterprise Ireland investment in the Voucher Programme.
The group have been excited to hear some of the presentations and ideas on how to 'innovate' the craft sector. We are really looking forward to our next Interregional Thematic Seminar (ITS), which will be hosted by DCCI on the 10th and 11th of May. This two-day event will feature lots of good practices from project partners in Finland, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain and will be open to the public. We can't wait to share with you our good practices on this interesting topic and hope you can join us at the event!
