Identifying innovation opportunities – using the internet to match universities with SMEs

Abstract

This paper describes work conducted for i10 – a collaboration of 10 universities in the East of England. It describes the development of a proactive process to facilitate knowledge creation between universities and Small to Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) and the internet-based tool used for doing this. Knowledge created is measured using subsequent knowledge transfer activities and the knowledge creation process is analysed in the context of Nonaka's Socialisation-Externalisation-Combination-Internalisation (SECI) model. The outcomes are of value to other universities tasked with helping SMEs to innovate and those interested in the development and usefulness of online tools for facilitating knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. It is also of interest to any institution developing tools for SME-university interfaces, identifying innovation opportunities, innovation benchmarking and company profiling.