The general objective of this project is to identify and exchange Good Practices about support and promotion of local entrepreneurship and innovative SMEs among the partners, taking into account their specific framework and existing Innovation Support Systems, as a way to maintain their integrity as living environments and contribute through local competencies to the Lisbon objectives.

This includes the following sub-objectives:

• Joint development of a methodology to describe and benchmark local good practices in the field of policies to support innovative SMEs and entrepreneurs.
• Identification and benchmark of the different local good practices at the partner Edge Cities, using the Innovation Hub experience as a yardstick.
• Production of a Good Practice Guide to be used by experts and stakeholders in order to study the different experiences and select the most adequate to be transferred locally.
• Analysis of the success factors of the different experiences and creation of a generic transregional Innovation Hub model applicable across the Edge Cities Network.
• Production of a Roadmap to be used by the political collective as a tool for the local implementation of the Innovation Hub model in an Edge City framework.
• Limited pilot implementation in some of the Edge Cities following the Roadmap in order to test its validity.
• Wide dissemination of the transregional Innovation Hub experience across the collective of EU Edge Cities.

The Edge Cities Network will incorporate the results of the project as a permanent toolkit to be improved and updated by the members beyond the administrative end of the project.