Benchmarking National - PRO INNO Europe

Budgets
Of the service providers in the benchmarking process, 73 % eventually provided
budget data. Care must be used in comparing budget figures because the services
have different service goals and designs and also different accounting and costing
standards.
The reported numbers suggest nonetheless that the benchmarked services may, on
average, be funded at rather low levels. The median amounts to € 187,000 p.a.,
which means that about half of the services may draw on less than that amount.
Taking overheads into account, the median would be at around € 158,000 p.a. –
hence, around 50 % of the service providers can spend at most € 158,000 p.a. on
direct support activities. For the case study services, in contrast, the average budget
available amounted to almost € 400,000 p.a., all available for direct service
activities, again using median values.
These results provide additional evidence that, despite the large number of
identified services, only small pockets of well-funded schemes exist for supporting
SMEs in the field of IPR.
5.3.5 The performance of the IPR support services
While the preceding section examined the resource (or input) side, this section now
looks at the output/outcome side. The analysis presented draws on the one hand
on information provided by the service providers in phase 2 of the research mission,
e.g., monitoring data. On the other hand, important insights are gained from the
results of the user survey in phase 3.
5.3.5.1 User take-up and out-reach
User take-up
Graph 14 shows which indicators are used by the service providers to monitor the
take-up of the offerings. It shows that most of the services collect information on
the number of users or beneficiaries of the services (71 %). The usage of more
Graph 14 Indicators used to measure take-up of the services,
percentage of services
No. of users/beneficiaries of the service
No. of participants in sessions/courses
No. of persons/institutions approached
No./Share of SME users/beneficiaries
No. of queries and/or information requests
No. of applications
No. of applications by SMEs
No. of SMEs approached
No. of queries and/or information requests by SMEs
Source: benchmarking process, n = 66
other indicators 11
22
32
29
43
48
48
45
52
71
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
%
67
TOWARDS GOOD PRACTICES – THE REAL WORLD OF IPR SUPPORT SERVICES