GIENAHS Alliance aims at addressing the strategic issue of interaction between HEIs and the particular target represented by SMEs, that although are the real driving force of the European economy, still face considerable difficulties in managing R&D processes. Innovation plays an increasingly important role in our economy both for citizens, seen as workers or as consumers, and for companies, due to its contribution to the acceleration and improvement in creating new products and services.
But there’s no innovation without research and education: to achieve the objective of investing by 2020 the 3% of EU GDP on R&D, in the next decade, Europe needs to train many more researchers and eliminate obstacles to their mobility. A better MATCH between SMEs and HEI is still required: SMEs need to develop their internal skills to face innovation in a more structured and systematic way, while HEIs need to improve their capacity of interaction with SMEs so that researchers can see also a genuine career prospect within SMEs.
GIENAHS fosters this MATCHING through the following steps:

• sharing best practices of interaction HEIs/SMEs at EU level.

• defining a EU standard of HEIs/SMEs interaction to better enhance the territorial competitiveness due to the co-creation of knowledge and innovation.

• define a new methodological approach to design industrial PhD paths “SMEs oriented” targeted on the specific needs of European SMEs that will pragmatically allow the integration of different cultural approaches to R&D.

• testing the new methodological approach by designing a new industrial PhD path “SMEs oriented” in Manufacturing field.

• proposing the harmonisation of Industrial PhD disciplines in Europe, to concretely promote the mobility of researchers;

• setting up a stable Observatory HEIs/SMEs/INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONS able to create virtuous and fruitful cooperation among SMEs, HEIs and researchers multiplying attractive employment opportunities for industrial research in European SMEs.