Abstract:

Innovation vouchers are small lines of credit provided by governments or regional  governments to start ups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to purchase services from public knowledge providers with a view to introducing innovations as a new, processes or services or products in their business operations. The voucher empowers the SME to approach knowledge providers with their innovation-related problems, something that they might not have done in the absence of such an incentive. And also the voucher provides an incentive for the public knowledge provider to work with SMEs when their tendency might either have been to work with larger firms or to have no industry engagement at all. The issuing of the voucher has two main impacts, both of which overcome major incentive barriers to the usual engagement between SMEs and knowledge providers. Innovation voucher has been implemented in Czech republic since 2009 and  the project quickly inspired other regions  and today the company's innovation vouchers require total in 11 regions of the Czech Republic. By 2013 it was in the Czech Republic filed 1456 application issued 462 vouchers. The aim of the study is to analyze the state of innovation activities and to give an overview of implementation innovation vouchers as an effective tools of transfer technology and open innovation.