Innovation & Entrepreneurship
New Frontier Services has delivered services to many of the EC’s leading Entrepreneurship and Innovation programmes , including entrepreneurship development services, proposal assessment and project, programme and policy evaluation services. These Programmes and Initiatives include the FP6 Research & Innovation Programme, Gate2Growth, InvestorNet, Praxis, TrendChart, Innovation Relay Centres and the Innovating Regions in Europe Network.


A recent example of New Frontier Services is the Energy2B (www.energy2b.eu) project, where New Frontier Services delivered innovative entrepreneurship coaching boot camps to students on five EU Universities, as part of the project’s aim of stimulating new business ideas and new business creation around sustainable energy ideas in European Universities (see below). Core New Frontier Staff played a key role in the launch and development of pioneering initiatives such as the Europe’s 500 Listing of High Growth Entrepreneurial companies, and have led the development of initiatives such as the European Investment Forum, which involved supporting hundreds of high-tech entrepreneurs in developing their business plan and strategy and facilitating their pursuit of and access to venture capital investors.

Examples of our recent work
Co-funded by the European Commission’s Intelligent Energy Europe Programme, Energy2B is an innovation stimulating initiative targeting university students. It presents an opportunity for them to turn energy innovation ideas into reality via new business start-ups. Idea competitions at both national and European level are enabled through the Energy2B website platform. The platform provides ten competitions for energy innovation ideas at a local level in five European countries (UK, Portugal, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Poland). The best energy innovations are selected for boot camp and follow up services given by energy, business planning, and investment experts. In parallel, 2 European idea competitions are organised, leading to the creation of energy innovations that have the potential to be funded for start-up. New Frontier Services' primary role was the development and delivery of innovative entrepreneurship coaching boot camps to students in the five partner EU Universities.
Working as a sub-contractor to The Evaluation Partnership (TEP), NFS provided a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the evaluation of EC-supported activities in the area of Innovation (including intellectual property support), covering the following initiatives:
      • IPR Help Desk, a key EU initiative in supporting IPR management among innovative SMEs in Europe

      • Innovation Relay Centres Network (IRC), the EC’s most important initiative for promoting trans-national technology transfer.

      • Trend Chart Initiative, the EC’s flagship initiative for tracking and monitoring innovation performance within the EU.

      • Innovating Regions in Europe (IRE) Network, an important initiative for promoting regional innovation.

      • Gate2Growth INVESTORNET initiative, an EC initiative for supporting networking and knowledge development, amongst Europe’s venture capital community, and facilitating investment in high-tech companies.
NFS was appointed to undertake an efficiency review of the FP6 Research & Innovation Programme. The purpose of the review was to provide an independent view on the funding outcomes of the Research & Innovation Programme, and to review the programme's operating processes and systems. The work helped filter the lessons learnt from the Research & Innovation Programme's experience and contribute to informing the process for the finalisation of the Competitiveness & Innovation (CIP) Programme.
For one of the Commission’s largest Innovation and Private Sector Development programmes, the Gate2Growth programme, the NFS team provided management services for the organisation of an innovation & entrepreneurship programme in the Czech Republic that addressed entrepreneurship, incubation and research commercialisation issues, with actors from across the Newly Acceded States. New Frontier Services also provided a moderator at one of the Plenary Panel discussions.