For the third time in a row ARC Fund’s premises were an open territory for discussing the SMEs and start-ups needs for external support and requirements for sustainable and innovation friendly business environment.
The following questions were brought up debating:
• new data and analyses for innovation activity of the Bulgarian enterprises; what implications could be drown from the trends identified;
• the (lack of) results of the 8th session of the National Innovation Fund and intentions of the Bulgarian SME Promotion Agency for catching up on procedure deadlines;
• opportunities for improving the work of the National Innovation Fund in line with the latest changes in some of the European financing instruments and venture schemes.
Representative of different stakeholder groups attended the discussion – business sector, external evaluators, intermediaries (Applied Research and Communication Fund, Association of Business Clusters in Bulgaria), research organizations (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia University, Sofia Technical University).
The main fields for further improvement of the National Innovation Fund include, among others, the following tips:
• The National Innovation Fund to continue its work as part of the Bulgarian SME Promotion Agency and not to be transferred to the Ministry of Economy. Even more, in accordance with the European Commission’s recommendation, it should be entirely institutionalized as an independent structure instead of being just a programme scheme in the framework of the Agency for SME Promotion;
• The Bulgarian institutions to gather their efforts in order to ensure a transparent, predictable and sustainable environment so as to reduce the risk for business sector and research organization in planning their innovation activity;
• The financing instruments managing authorities to systematically use in their full potential existing data sets from all national institutions’ registers in order to identify different company segments and their specific need for external support, not only financial, but also information, consultancy, etc.
