Connecting Universities and SMEs to Fuel an Innovation Economy

Challenge

This project was done for NSW Treasury and the NSW Innovation and Productivity Council. (IPC) The IPC is an independent council that advises the Government on priorities for innovation-led economic development and productivity in NSW and reports to the Deputy Premier.

Collaborative consultation engagement with key stakeholders from the University-SME Collaborations project to reveal insights that supports productivity driven innovation for economic growth, productivity and new job creation.

Approach

Uncovering behavioural and attitudinal insights from key stakeholders to generate opportunity areas.

An exploratory interviewing approach was applied to uncover behavioural and attitudinal insights of key stakeholders that offer a deeper understanding of both the opportunity areas and challenges to foster collaboration between SMEs and Universities.

The Design Thinking approach places stakeholders at the centre of the problem-discovery process to empathise with their real-world experiences and uncover the challenges and opportunities from their perspective to further support collaboration.

From the interviews, quotes and stories, statements of significance were collected from the engaged and disengaged SMEs that provide insight into the motivations, experiences, barriers and opportunities of SME-University collaboration. This provides a deeper understanding of the SME’s point of view and offers a new perspectives about what is, and is not, important to them and what worked, and did not work, during their collaboration experience.

Outcomes

Identifying expansive growth opportunities to fuel greater collaboration and help the organisations scale.

The process uncovered a few key opportunities that can be leveraged in order to set the University-SME Collaboration programs up for success.

Eight key opportunities were unearthed ranging from elevating awareness, creating value propositions, injecting fresh thinking from graduates to providing open exchange and accessibility.

In addition, expansive growth opportunities were identified to develop and fuel more collaboration opportunities that focus on helping the organisation scale into new markets, especially with high tech SME’s.