Europe – SME’s Intellectual Capital

The European Commission has published a report -- RICARDIS: Reporting Intellectual Capital to Augment Research, Development and Innovation in SMEs on the role of intellectual capital reporting in the research field.

A key aspect objective of the EU Re-use of PSI Directive is to encourage entrepreneurs to develop and open up new innovative cross border services that exploit public sector data and information. One of the key domains that seek out and heavily use data and information is that of research especially research oriented companies.

Within the European Union the majority of companies within the private sector are Micro and Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) and they employ a substantial number of people.

One of the objectives of the ePSIplus project is to raise the awareness with potential entrepreneurs and to possibly through the many meetings together with the project web site is to provide information, support and encouragement to such people and organisations.

One of the issues faced by potential exploiters of Public Sector Information is that of raising finance, dealing with Intellectual Property rights, protecting of ideas and concepts whilst they develop their business opportunity.

To assist SMEs the European Commission operates an information portal Investing in European Research

Within this portal there is a section that deals with a number of the issues that SMEs face at (See web page: Investing in European Research)

One of the items of interest is a report that was published in June 2006 by the European Commission (164 pages, Reference: EUR 22095) produced by an Expert Group titled: RICARDIS: Reporting Intellectual Capital to Augment Research, Development and Innovation in SMEs on the role of intellectual capital reporting in the research field.

This report will be of interest to all SMEs or organisations involved in supporting SMEs.