WP6 - Industry sectors and SME Awareness PDFPrintE-mail

Thursday, 26 February 2009 09:49

WP Leader: RFID NORDIC

The SME community represent more than 95% of businesses and industry sectors in Europe. The revolutionary and radical nature of RFID is as relevant to the SME community as it is to the large companies. The extensive interest and consultation process within Europe, concerning RFID, now demands that there is a significant drive on awareness of RFID. More importantly, it is necessary to provide tools and services to allow the SME community to fully understand and exploit this important area of technology, particularly in areas of process development, new products, enterprise and innovation. It has to be recognised that different Member States are at different levels of adoption and the RACE networkRFID will particularly address this issue.

The primary objective of the "SME Awareness" work package is to first of all establish the SME End User needs; to introduce appropriate business assist and development initiatives, which will be supported by accredited advisors. It is critical to address the barriers to adoption. We are fortunate that one of the partners in the RACE networkRFID project is UEAPME, the European Federation for SMEs and we will seek to work directly with them and their 78 national associations, along with other interested European organisations, to establish the answers. Our target is to promote product, process and service innovation opportunities to the entire SME community.

Work Package 6 will:

  • Identify the most relevant SME organisations by state and by activity sector (industry associations, guilds and institutes etc)
  • Establish SME End User needs
  • Examine existing business assist and development initiatives
  • Address the SME barriers to adoption

Work Package 6 will work closely with WP5 and WP7 to define the identity of the network itself and to establish the existing platform of service support, which is available from the contracted and associate members of RACE networkRFID and recommend appropriate adoption by Member States. This should establish early momentum across the 27 Member States and enable dialogue country by country, to determine specific implementation needs. It is confidently expected that, within the existing services of members of the RACE networkRFID Thematic Network, there will be a number immediately available which will enable Member States to move forward quickly and efficiently, engaging and implementing with the SME community.