Sustainable Electronic Product Development in the Baltic Sea Region: A Regional Gap Analysis of Lab Testing Services

Baltic Sea Region represents one of the most innovative areas within Europe with dominating SME sector. In order to keep the region and their product developments competitive it is necessary to safeguard access to high-tech labs including test services. This can be realized only through regional networks of universities – business cooperation. The European Union started the project “Test-4-SME” in 2017 to investigate and promote laboratory networks for testing and assessment of electronic products developed by SMEs from BSR. In a BSR wide online survey, the project consortium identified existing gaps in the regional supply of open laboratories together with shortcomings in services, expertise or test equipment, which is needed by SMEs for electronic product or devices testing. The authors take place in the “Test-4-SME” project, conducted the survey and analysed the regional demand together with the availability of labs for SME sector in the BSR. The study focusses on the research question in which BSR regions there exist already university-business networks of open labs for SME and to which extent the offered services meet the regional demand. Therefore, an approach of a gap analysis is used, which is based on primary data gathered in a BSR wide survey together with expert interviews. The results of the study are discussed in the context of the existing literature and recommendations for future improvements are highlighted.