Concentrating support services focus on research-intensive SMEs
About this good practice
Recently in Bulgaria, the high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive services sectors have developed extremely dynamically. This is reflected in a change of several percentage points in the structure of the economy both in terms of the number of enterprises and employees and in terms of added value. The share of value-added generated by SMEs in high-tech manufacturing sectors and knowledge-intensive services rose from 22% in 2008 to 27% in 2019. Still there is a high level of untapped potential for the SME to grow.
ARC Fund as the coordinator of many support networks proposes a unique set of business-oriented services that captures the dramatic global transformation trends caused by the 2020 pandemics crisis and offers business support tailored to individual SME needs.
The ARC Fund mobilizes an advanced blend of key competencies and expertise needed to enhance SME growth, innovation, resilience, and sustainability.
• SME internationalization
• Single Market support, including legal advice, CE marking, customs, standardization, outstanding debts
• Research and tech-transfer
• Sustainability
• Start-up, mid-cap, scale-up
• Digitalization
• Access2Finance
• Innovation support, Innovation management -
• IPR
The focus is on highly innovative enterprises, of all development stages. While basic services (e.g., giving information, signposting, etc.) are delivered to a wide pool of companies, the core target group of the advanced services are SMEs with high growth potential.
Resources needed
50% of the budget/costs are allocated to staff, where support services delivered by 1 FTE result in 5 international contracts by clients of ARC, and
50% goes for other direct costs (e.g. promotion, capacity building and other events)
This could be scaled up depending on the ultimate results sought.
Evidence of success
NIF, EEN, ECAbit programmes have been used to help companies win awards, prestige and new customers.
The competences for this has been aggregated through numerous international projects supported by the European Commission (FP4, FP5, FP6, FP7, Leonardo da Vinci, PHARE, EuropeAid), the World Bank, UNDP, USAID, and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ).
Potential for learning or transfer
Transferability requires long term, consistent approach to develop and sustain team of experts and portfolio of support services.
The ARC Fund has accumulated a team of experts with proven capacity to deliver SME support services over decades. They have demonstrated over the years excellent skills in enhancing SME growth and sustainability in their specific sectors (clustering, RIS3 priorities, start-ups, etc.).
An important prerequisite for sustainability is the fact that all experts have SME support as a central milestone in their long-term mission - be it towards greening and sustainability, or towards innovation-driven growth, or digitalization and resilience.
Synergies and complementarities various funding instruments of the macro-regional strategies and regional development, or structural funds on innovation and smart growth have been an indispensable dimension in the relationship with SMEs and is a sustainable trend projected into the future.