European Union FP7 Project CADIC
"Cross-enterprise assessment and development of intellectual Capital"
www.cadic-europe.org


CADIC's Aims


Cross-Organisational Assessment and Development of Intellectual Capital (CADIC) is a project within the European Union’s FP7 programme that addresses the aim of the European Charter for Small Enterprises to
foster the involvement of small enterprises in inter-firm cooperation at local, national, European and international levels.

Focus

CADIC focuses on providing an
infrastructure for growing and multiplying open and extensible clusters of enterprises, in a business-to-business environment, where Intellectual Capital (IC) can flow to the mutual benefit of all concerned.

Major benefits for SME's in a CADIC-supported cluster

Clusters in CADIC are founded in connections based on flows of Intellectual Capital (IC Flows), in a way that:

ENABLES the SME cluster to be collaboratively managed by the participating SMEs themselves in specially designed group spaces supported by collaboration tools available as both CADIC offline and online services.

ENGAGES creative processes for innovative development involving the participating SMEs and their collaborative networks in a variety of industrial,commercial and service sectors.

SUPPORTS local development and contributes to the improvement of all the individual enterprises in the cluster, through the synergy gained by initiating CADIC’s online and offline services

FACILITATES the efforts of the participating SMEs to engage in and strengthen their own cluster, to their mutual benefit. CADIC’s Catalyst SMEs have a key role in this process.


CADIC tools and services

The CADIC framework provides methods and tools to support Intellectual Capital based collaboration between SMEs in the CADIC clusters.

  • An IC Benchmarking System enables SMEs to compare their own intangible resource base with other organisations in order to find suitable partners to collaborate and manage value-adding IC flows in SME-clusters.
  • A specially designed web 2.0 platform and online services will be developed and implemented, integrating CADIC’s IC Benchmarking database, and “InCapedia”, an evolving resource on Intellectual Capital, its flows and applications.
  • Offline services to support the effective and efficient offline IC-Flow between the collaborating partners (e.g. methods to shape collaboration events, special moderation techniques, methods to reactivate cluster activities). In-service training will be available for the key roles in the cluster.

Who is CADIC?

The
CADIC consortium is led by Confédération Européenne des Associations de Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (CEA-PME). The consortium comprises:
  • SME Associations and Groupings (SME-AGs) and catalyst SMEs from a wide range of sectors located in six core European countries (England, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece).
  • RTD partners: Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK), London School of Economics (LSE), Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) and University of Calabria (UC)