The innovation environment of the Region of Navarre

The purpose of this report is to show how the region of Navarre tackles innovation. The report presents, first at all, a quick overview of the region. Secondly, the innovation in the region is broken down according to 5 different groups: Public Institutions, University Spin‐offs or Students who intend to start businesses, Business Development Institutions, R&D institutions and Enterprises. Finally, the paper reveals results of the survey carried out in those 5 groups. The report draws attention to the great effort that Navarra is doing in order to develop innovative initiatives in the region through the 4 technological plans implemented from 2002 until the present day. Thanks to all those measures, Navarra is nowadays among the top 100 regions in the EU according to the index of the European Innovation Scoreboard and is among the top 3 in Spain. According to the main results of the survey, these are the major conclusions: ‐ Public institutions: The outcomes capture the efforts of the Government of Navarre to improve the economy of Navarre in the area of innovation, supporting enterprises in every aspect, such as fund‐raising, assistance and R&D consulting, new market areas and technology and knowledge transfer. ‐ University Spin‐off enterprises cooperate with several institutions in the creation of a new product or innovation. On the whole, they do not belong to a network. ‐ Entrepreneurial University Students show great interest in online platforms, where they can find information for their business idea or even help for their innovative projects. ‐ Business development institutions: despite the small sample available, it can be observed that these institutes usually support other organizations to raise funds for making investments in innovation and help them to obtain partners and consultancy services. ‐ R&D institutes: no matter the number of employees of R&D institutes, they belong to a network. Although they use external IT tools supporting innovation creation and technology transfer, they hardly share any information through those external tools. Enterprises look for information to support innovation and technology transfer processes by using external resources. The kind of information they search for is quite basic, not too deep. The main reason for not using this information channel is that there is no internal need. Internet seems to be the main source of information. 66% of firms receive information from universities and higher education institut