Adaptic

End date

31th of december de 2009

Funders

This project is funded by the Institute for Small and Medium Industry of the Generalitat Valenciana (IMPIVA) and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Second Plan of Enterprise Competitiveness Valenciana (PCEV) for 2009, with file number IMPSMA/2009/9.

Description

The information and communication technologies constitute a horizontal field of application in any sector of activity. Although in themselves they form an own scientific-technical scope, the ICT also corresponds with a set horizontal technologies that serve as a support to the realization of everyday tasks and that improve the efficiency of this process. Information and communication technologies allow you to manage, fully maintain, and communicate the information that the company executives use to be able to make decisions. The information and communication technologies changed the industrial society of the nineteenth and twentieth century into the information society, changing the analogical world into a digital world, limited information into information saturation, businesses based on products into business based on services and all this in a multicultural and open environment and contributing enormously to the process known as globalization. In this sense, the globalization and the reduction of production costs cause that the competing possibilities of the companies happen obligatorily through the innovation, and more concretely in the sector covered by this project, Technical Innovation, where technology is understood as a set of theories and techniques that enable the practical use of scientific knowledge, that is, the science applied to the reality.

Innovation in general is the application of new processes, products and services in a given environment to achieve better results than those obtained previously. In this sense, technical innovation makes reference to the new ideas, new practices, etc. that allow to improve the existing technologies or that allow to apply the technologies in a different way to get better results. It is important to say that innovation means not only creating revolutionary inventions or new products, but the simple fact to apply existing technologies in a different environment from the habitual one can suppose an important innovation. In addition, you can talk about innovation at the product level, enabling a better product in terms of cost reduction, improved functionality, a better design, better adaptation to the environment, lighter or ecological materials, better ergonomics, or about innovation at the process level, that implies introducing changes in the way things are made to obtain better results, such as greater efficiency, higher quality,..

Logically, having the capacity to innovate in a particular environment gives a company a huge competitive advantage over others. In the technological world, technological innovation is not something that appears by itself in the society and the companies, but quite the contrary. It requires an effort to achieve it, carefully implementing a number of mechanisms that contribute in the first place to get to know the existing technologies, later to be able to apply these technologies in the processes of the company or to generate new technologies.

Therefore, technological knowledge is an essential mechanism to facilitate the strategic decisions of an organization in the ICT sector that can perfectly include the creation of a R&D line within the company to investigate a certain technology, a patent request for a development the company has made and is innovative, the establishments of collaborations with another organization to develop together or the increase in promotional campaigns for the company in certain sectors where it has encountered a niche market, to name a few. Many of these strategies can only be carried out with technically qualified personnel, so it is important that gradually the level of the company personnel gets better, to be able to achieve better results on efficiency and quality.

The ITI is a non-profit association created in 1994 at the initiative of IMPIVA and UPV, with the primary mission of maintaining and improving the competitive position of enterprises through the realization of Research, Development and Innovation and its subsequent transfer to companies. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the ITI to spread the advancement of technologies and the potential emergent market niches that serve to help companies to become more competitive. To do so, within its usual activity el ITI realizes continuously a revision and diffusion of the technologies and existing markets through mechanisms like the Technological Observatory of the ICT Sector (http://observatorio.iti.upv.es). This information comes from the R&D activities developed by the Institute, the activity of the innovation department and commercial department in direct contact with the companies for the detection of its needs and the presence in the multiple technological platforms and workgroups on national and international level that enable the uptake of technology trends, the market and R&D respectively.

Objectives

Given the description of the project, el ITI, faithful to its responsibility to contribute to the advancement and consolidation of the ICT sector in the Valencian Community, carried out the present project, with the main objective of guiding businesses to improve their competitiveness and consolidation in the markets in which they operate now and in the development of new markets through the diffusion of the direct and effective form of technological and market opportunities, as well as of the existing mechanisms for the use of the same.