In collaboration with Poland’s Ministry of Economic Development, the World Bank designed and tested a new approach - "entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP)" - to help the authorities shift from a top-down to a bottom-up innovation policy that engages the private sector, science, and public administration, as part of "research and innovation smart specialization strategy-RIS3." The project should help Poland’s government to more efficiently invest 10 billion euro into innovation by 2020, mostly funded by the European Union.
The EDP consisted of (i) face-to-face interviews with the top management of mostly small and medium-size enterprises, which help to understand the real drivers and constraints to enterprise innovation that are hard to detect through standard surveys; (ii) Smart Labs, which are a series of business-friendly, time-efficient workshops that help assess the innovation potential of a specific economic activity; (iii) innovation maps, which help tease out information about technological trends perceived by the private sector; and (iv) crowdsourcing, online surveys that reach enterprises that usually do not interact with the public sector.
Firm-level interviews, documented here, are at the core of the EDP. Interviews aimed to identify key drivers for and constraints on small and medium-size enterprises innovation, identify the key attributes of companies that could benefit the most from public intervention, and take stock of key business and technological trends, as perceived by the companies.
More than 500 face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted by World Bank experts with companies' top management and/or owners during June 2014 - October 2015 in four regions of Poland: Dolnoslaskie, Zachodniopomorskie, Swietokrzyskie and Slaskie. Interviewed enterprises belonged to the 10 smart specialization areas selected by the Ministry of Economic Development as key priorities for Poland's innovation policy. The firms were selected using quota sampling method.