Nowadays, many European citizens face high risk of unemployment due to fast changing requirements of the job market. Technological changes, decreasing relevance of traditional working competencies and key meaning of new ones put many Europeans in high unemployment risk (i.e. due to automation or inadequacy of their competencies) or employment out of their competence profile (skills mismatch) leading to decreased productivity and life quality. Especially constant innovation related changes, new
technologies or business models, create the need for fast adaptation and developing corresponding competences which are not immediately available at the job market.
In this scope, taking into account especially the major role of SMEs for EU economy, open innovation (OI) provides companies unique chances to engage in forefront innovation in face of often insufficient resources. This however requires recruiting specialised staff that could support OI processes. The OPI project aims to develop and test a comprehensive methodology and tools for requalification of human resources to obtain professional competences for those future oriented positions in open innovation scope.

Due to, from one side, high importance of OI especially for strongly SMEs based economies and from the other, limited understanding of the OI processes, their benefits and job market opportunities among many job market stakeholders, the OPI project will aim at building labor market intelligence and competences in the area of open innovation that will allow to effectively develop supply of skills to fill the market gap while capitalising on existing pool of human capital.
The project will approach the issue from 2 perspectives.
First, it will improve awareness of OI related professions, of their relevance and specifications among the staff related with HR development and guidance (staff of HR agencies, employment offices, NGOs fighting unemployment issues and firms’ internal HR staff) and capacitate the staff to prepare employees and job seekers to adapt to new types of positions. In this scope, the project will not only extend and develop the competencies of the HR personnel supporting adult learners, but will also provide them with ready to use digital tools to diagnose re-qualification potential and further on, an on-demand OI upskilling program developed for the specific needs of OI competence building of unemployed/adults in unemployment risk.
Second, it will directly address the needs of unemployed and staff in the need of requalification or upskilling to obtain key for modern and future market competences which is highly obstructed by lack of awareness of OI in the target group and lack of access to high quality learning opportunities in the OI area. In OPI scope they will not only gain access to their needs oriented program for development of in-demand professional competences, but by capacitation of the specific HR support staff they will gain access to guidance in the area and will obtain critical motivation related with realistic recognition for the competences relevance in their job market environment.

Specifically, the project will deliver:
– Study of local state of open innovation competencies,
– Methodology and tools to build open innovation understanding among HR specialist and build their ability to guide job seekers or employees through upskilling/requalification to take position in scope of open innovation,
– Diagnostic tool to evaluate human capital in scope of open innovation,
– E-learning solution for building unemployed/employees in high unemployment risk competencies to take roles in scope of open innovation,
– Comprehensive requalification guide for HR professionals and adult educators.

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