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Introduction 2

1. The concept of innovation 3

2. Key activities of Innotek 5

Incubation 5

Economic development projects 5

New Business 6

The decision criteria 7

3. Regional focus or working across borders? 9

3.1. Own vision 9

3.2. Innovation in Europe 9

3.2.1. Europe and its regions 10

3.2.2. EBN 11

3.2.3. Universities 12

4. Important European economic development projects 13

4.1. TIME-project: 13

4.2. STROSMERG-project (STRong SMEs for Regional Growth) 13

4.3. Spin-off project Slovenia: 14

Conclusions 15

* Introduction

In the following paper we will examine the concept of innovation by looking at one particular case. By doing so we hope to get a better view of some innovative processes. The company which we will try to conduct the case study on, is called Innotek and is located in Geel, Belgium.

Innotek is an extremely interesting case because the company has made ‘Innovation’ into one of its core competencies. Innotek evolved from an innovation advice company in the eighties and nineties of the past century, to a hands-on (innovative) business developer in recent years. It now focuses on the support of spinoff companies that are a result from the know-how spillovers in universities and industry. Given this innovative supporting role in Flanders, Innotek has been granted full membership of The European Business & Innovation Centre Network (EBN).

Within this paper we will mainly focus on Innotek’s main business activity. We will first briefly explain the concept of innovation in the first chapter to get a broader picture of the innovative world that Innotek plays an important part in. After that we will focus on Innotek’s core activities, namely incubation, economic development and new business development. These are reviewed in full in the second chapter. In order to understand these activities as part of a European strategy, an explanation of the EBN and BICs has to be given. This will be done in the...