This deliverable outlines the pilot-project Competition for Best Technology Innovation which has the objective to promote entrepreneurship and technology incorporation (as alternative to technology transfer) in the domain of high technologies, and gives assistance to potential and existing innovative entrepreneurs, who are willing and able to spill their own ideas and inventions onto the market to realize valuable innovations.
Connecting innovativity and entrepreneurship is a recepy for cometitiveness of individuals, companies, universities, and the states themselves. Best technology innovation competition has been developed based exactly on this idea and the wish to promote entrepreneurial spirit ammong researchers, students, innovators, creative individuals, teams and companies, focused on those who would contribute towards transforming the economy of Serbia into a knowledge based one.
The experience gained in Serbia with this competition, lasting from 2005 without breaks, and being all the time modified based on observations of the outcomes, enabled the organizing team to gain evidence into strengths and weaknesses of the Serbian R&D sector, education system and entrepreneurial climate. This, in turn, has been transformed into best practice directions used by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development.
The idea for internationalizing the competition stems directly from this outcome. It is an instrument to get insight into strengths and weaknesses of different systems, in order to have a direct measuring instrument for evaluating different innovation parameters in participating countries. These parameters include, among others: percentage of researchers involved in the innovative activities, percentage of successful innovations created by researchers, percentage of innovations resulting in technology incorporation (creation of new companies), percentage of innovations licensed to third parties, pervasiveness of entrepreneurial spirit among students, percentage of innovative individuals, teams and companies in a certain country. Based on these multidimensional variables, correlation of effectiveness of different system measures applied in different countries can be drawn using econometric tools. If this measure would be accepted, at the end of 2018 year observation period using the competition as a measuring tool, recommendations about which policies are to be implemented in which country could be issued.