“The Value of Technology – based entrepreneurship in regional competitiveness” took place in Donostia-San Sebastian in October 2014.

The Final Conference of “Funding Policies to bring Innovation to Finance/market/people” (InnoFun) INTERREG IVC project took place on 28th October 2014 in Donostia-San Sebastián where the results of three years of collaborative work on innovating the funding of innovation were presented.

The reason behind the project birth was that many innovative ideas and research results were never implemented because they could not achieve financial support, due to the slow selection processes for funding.

Along these three years, Lapland UAS and 12 other partners from across Europe have been working together with a common objective: Innovation in the funding of innovation.

In the belief that the most innovative research results that could be viable in the market and make a difference often face challenges related to funding, it was thought that something should be done to overcome these challenges. So, partners started to think and work on areas such as: the possibilities of simplifying communication between funding and applying for funding, improving the efficiency of the selection process, the use of new technologies for communication between the two sides and the cooperation between public funds and private investors.

This Final Conference presented the conclusions of this reflection and the work developed, in which special emphasis has been given to tools such as pitching, digital story-telling or e-voting to improve communication between funding and applying for funding. Innovative and successful initiatives throughout Europe were displayed by some INNOFUN partners (regions such as Flanders in Belgium, Estonia, Lapland and PACA on France) as well as some recommendations were launched by INNOFUN, to improve the efficiency and impact of support programs to finance.

The Conference permitted to present the work undertaken by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa regarding innovation. This Department has worked with Tecnalia R&I in the project for the promotion of technology-based entrepreneurship. Asier Rufino, the Director of Tecnalia Venture also took part and shared the view of the Technology Transfer Office of Tecnalia regarding this issue.

Other speakers were Peter Baeck from NESTA and Philippe Vanrie from EBN, the European Network of Innovation Centres, revealed some questions for the future of innovation financing together with Jason Martinez, of the Joint Technical Secretariat, who presented EUROPE Programme INTERREG, which will publish its first calls in the first half of 2015.