Facilitating Funding Evaluation and data Collection techniques regarding SME support programmes (EFFECT-SME) 

Innovation agencies often face difficulties in designing and implementing support programs with the potential to impact their most important clients, start-ups and SMEs. Monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment methods and tools that include the collection of robust data to evaluate the applied programs are needed to effectively support the distribution and decision to maintain the programs, redesign the offering and / or create entirely new programs that are better fit the needs of start-ups and SMEs. 

The main objective of the project EFFECT-SME was to improve the quality of innovation support programs for start-ups and SMEs by developing an efficient and effective methodology that evaluates the impact of support programs on these actors.  

The project consortium applied the Twinning + methodology through 3 interactive learning workshops focussing on evaluating the impact of the support programs in force in the participating regions. 

The Design Option Paper (DOP) on the impact assessment has been the main output of the project. The innovative methodology developed during the project has been disseminated through numerous business support networks for subsequent exploitation by innovation agencies in Europe. 

Steinbeis Europa Zentrum participated in the project consortium bringing expertise in SME support programmes and helped the project consortium to develop impact-oriented evaluation guidelines for the SME support programmes. It also produced a Design Option Paper (DOP) present the results of the impact assessment analysis.  

Project duration: 04/2021-04/2022 

Participating countries: Czech Republic, Germany, Spain