The approaches of smes to EU funding opportunities: an analysis of the wood furniture sector of Marche Region

The European Union offers instruments to help the Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to support competitiveness, to develop innovation activities and to grow in domestic and international markets. Given the fundamental role of SMEs to territorial development and the importance of European funds as the main instruments to overcome the well-known difficulties to access to finance, the present work explores which are the main barriers to access to the support instruments provided by European Commission and the main perceived impacts on different areas of business activities. In detail, the study focused on the approaches of SMEs operating in one of the most relevant sectors in Italy, the wood furniture one, belonging to the Marche Region, center of one of the main wood-furniture districts in Italy. The final goal is to provide insights on possible policy routes to promote the participation of SMEs. For these purposes first an empirical survey was sent to 2047 SMEs of the wood furniture sector in Italy. The survey was answered by 270 SMEs involving 95 SMEs of the Marche Region. Second, interviews were conducted involving a representative of Cluster initiative in supporting SMEs, a Project Manager and consultant that held the role of chief executive of the development agency of Marche Region, and the technological center Cosmob that provides services to SMEs of the territory. The selection of these actors has been guided by the objective of collecting different perspective from those figures that play an active role in the definition of the regional policies and in supporting SMEs in participating to European projects as services providers. The dissertation is structured in five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the topics and provides an overview of the main instruments (direct and indirect) available at a European and Regional level, with a brief presentation of the main characteristics of the programs. Chapter 2 presents a review of the recent contributions on the topic, aimed at identifying the main approaches to the theme and at identifying the obstacles and the main perceived impacts evidenced by recent research as a forward base for the empirical study. Chapter 3 describes the characteristics of the wood furniture sector contextualized in the region of Marche and provides an overview of the main regional policies developed by the policy makers for the sector. Chapter 4 presents the quantitative study on SMEs of Marche Region and operates a comparison between the approaches of these SMEs with other SMEs located on the Italian territory. Chapter 5 presents the qualitative study and the results of the interviews. The final Chapter summarizes the finding of the previous chapters and some recommendations are outlined. Finally, limitation and future areas of research are pointed out. In line with the evidence provided by the main studies on this topic, SMEs from the wood furniture sector of the Marche Region are partially aware of the opportunities linked to EU projects but are still not familiar with their accessibility and use, especially when it comes to European direct funds. In fact, they find difficulties in managing the entire process from the research phase to the financing reporting phase. The tendency is in line with trends of SMEs located in other Italian regions. Furthermore, SMEs that have experienced the use of EU funds registered positive effects after the participation in projects, mostly in terms of investments in fixed aspects and on innovation activities. These findings are confirmed by the actors involved that agree with the fact that the SMEs are far away in seizing all the opportunities provided by European Union, and the main obstacles are linked to their short-term mindset that is at the basis of their organization of work and does not allow them to approach to long term project such as the research and development ones. The region must support a deeper change in the vision of SMEs. The study contributes to the research regarding the impacts of accessing European projects and about the difficulties linked to the participation that is still limited. Furthermore, the work provides a contribution about the topic considering as focus of the analysis a specific sector and a specific regional territory.