InTraRed: Boosting the business innovation capacity of SMEs to emerge stronger from COVID-19 disruption

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many business owners and functional team leaders in the SME sector to rapidly rethink their business, making innovation and digital transformation a must to ensure stability and, in the worst case, even survive. Most SMEs, pushed by sudden market changes, implemented innovation processes not as a structured and strategical response but mostly as a roughly improvised "escape forward".

Amongst the most relevant lessons learned by SMEs from the pandemic, is the need to prioritise today’s actions to enhance a business’s competitive ability and build strategic resilience for tomorrow, which in brief, is the main aim of the high-quality tailored training recently developed in the frame of InTraRed Project.

“InTraRed: Innovation Transfer Ready SMEs” is a European Erasmus+ Project that seeks to support business owners and functional team leaders in the SME sector to build the required skills and competencies in innovation management and, at the same time, developing educational synergies with VET providers to jointly implement customised innovation management processes at business and local level. These SMEs will boost now their business capacity to rapidly adopt the latest management methods as well as bring new products/services to the market so that will be well-placed to capitalise more effectively on the opportunities arising in the post-COVID-19 recovery.

The following free-to-use components of the InTraRed training provision are now available on our eLearning platform (https://elearning.intrared.eu/) in 4 languages – English, Greek, Slovenian and Spanish:

• The Innovation Management Curriculum: A compendium of online learning modules complemented by a series of masterclass sessions that introduces SME owners and executives to a wide range of topics that are specific to the innovation management processes of SMEs.
• The In-service Training Programme: A Training of Trainers model that ensures VET providers and professionals working directly with SMEs, build their capacity to deliver the InTraRed training provision.
• Library of Innovation Inspired Case Studies: A collection of 24 real-life narrative cases studies of business innovations, aimed at boosting the understanding of selected innovation issues and topics approached along with educational content.

Next steps: Stay tuned for our information events to be held within November and December 2021 in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Spain. Dates and agenda will be published soon! 

Follow our progress over the coming months at www.intrared.eu, Facebook or contact us

The project is funded by the European Commission, in the framework of Erasmus+ programme and runs for 27 months from October 2019 to December 2021.