With Fontys' new educational developments we became part of the project called 'BILOBA'. The principal outlines of this new education are based on developing competences, communication by ICT and setting up a major-minor educational system. Fontys has already developed 40 minors with topics related to several areas from institutes' backgrounds. One of the minor courses is 'Strategic Innovation'. The main goal of this minor is to make students competent to contribute to innovation in the SME's. Students will acquire relevant knowledge as well as relevant competences for developing innovation in companies. The outline of the minor is 50 % knowledge development and 50% project work, where the knowledge is used in practice. New in the project is the so-called 'Innovation Simulator'. In this simulator as part of the project students will be confronted with the real world of initiating innovation in the context of a real company. Role-play is an important element to this simulator. We need to learn more about this approach. We have done some evaluations during the spring of 2007 and have found some imperfections, which will be changed in June of 2007/2008 as an outcome of an evaluation with all of the participants.
This paper addresses new funding issues faced by SMEs. Over a period of nine months, the authors conducted a preliminary study into the problems surrounding stacked funding faced by SMEs and their financial advisers. The study includes a short literature review, the outcomes of three round table discussions and the identification of problems and possible solutions.
The Dutch greenhouse horticultural industry is characterized by world leadership in high-tech innovation. The dynamics of this playing field are innovation in production systems and automation, reduction in energy consumption and sharing limited space. However, international competitive advantage of the industry is under pressure and sustainable growth of individual enterprises is no longer a certainty. The sector's ambition is to innovate better and grow faster than the competition in the rest of the world. Realizing this ambition requires strengthening the knowledge base, stimulating entrepreneurship, innovation (not just technological, but especially business process innovation). It also requires educating and professionalizing people. However, knowledge transfer in this industry is often fragmented and innovation through collaboration takes up a mere 25-30% of the opportunities. The greenhouse horticulture sector is generally characterized by small scale, often family run businesses. Growers often depend on the Dutch auction system for their revenues and suppliers operate mainly independently. Horizontal and vertical collaboration throughout the value chain is limited. This paper focuses on the question: how can the grower and the supplier in the greenhouse horticulture chain gain competitive advantage through radical product and process innovation. The challenge lies in time- to-market, in customer relationship, in developing new product/market combinations and in innovative entrepreneurship. In this paper an innovation and entrepreneurial educational and research programme is introduced. The programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. Using best practice examples, the paper illustrates how companies can realize growth and improve innovative capabilities of the organization as well as the individual by linking economic and social sustainability. The paper continues to show how participants of the programme develop competencies by means of going through a learning cycle of single-loop, double-loop and triple loop learning: reduction of mistakes, change towards new concepts and improvement of the ability to learn. Furthermore, the paper discusses our four-year programme, whose objectives are trying to eliminate interventions that stimulate the innovative capabilities of SME's in this sector and develop instruments that are beneficial to organizations and individual entrepreneurs and help them make the step from vision to action, and from incremental to radical innovation. Finally, the paper illustrates the importance of combining enterprise, education and research in networks with a regional, national and international scope, with examples from the greenhouse horticulture sector. These networks generate economic regional and national growth and international competitiveness by acting as business accelerators.
