VIESOJI ISTAIGA LIETUVOS INOVACIJU CENTRAS

Their core work

Lithuanian Innovation Centre (LIC) is a public innovation agency that delivers hands-on business support services to SMEs — coaching, key account management, investor readiness training, and innovation capacity building. They operate as Lithuania's national delivery partner for EU SME support instruments, helping small companies commercialize ideas, access finance, and adopt advanced manufacturing practices. Beyond direct SME services, they design and test new support methodologies through peer learning networks with other European innovation agencies.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

From 2014 to 2018, LIC focused almost exclusively on SME Instrument coaching and key account management — a narrow, well-defined role helping Lithuanian SMEs navigate EU funding and build innovation capacity. Starting around 2018-2019, their scope broadened significantly: they moved into investor readiness services, scale-up support, open innovation design challenges, and advanced manufacturing assistance, while also entering an unusual legal-tech doctoral network. This signals a deliberate shift from being a pure coaching delivery body to becoming a fuller-spectrum innovation agency with design, finance, and Industry 4.0 capabilities.

LIC is evolving from a national SME coaching provider into a multi-service innovation agency with growing expertise in advanced manufacturing transformation and startup investment readiness.

How they like to work

LIC balances leadership and partnership almost evenly — they coordinated 7 of 16 projects, mostly their recurring national SME Coach programmes, while joining 8 others as participants in larger European consortia. With 114 unique partners across 33 countries, they operate as a well-connected hub rather than a closed network, typical of innovation agencies that serve as national nodes in pan-European support schemes. They are comfortable both running small national projects independently and contributing specialized SME support expertise to large multi-country initiatives.

LIC has collaborated with 114 distinct partners across 33 countries, giving them one of the broadest geographic networks for an organization of their size. Their connections span innovation agencies, IP offices, and business intermediaries across virtually all EU member states.

What sets them apart

LIC's distinctive value is their deep, continuous experience delivering EU SME support instruments at the national level — five consecutive SME Coach projects over seven years gives them unmatched operational knowledge of what actually works in innovation coaching. For consortium builders, they offer a reliable Lithuanian national partner with proven programme delivery capability and direct access to the Lithuanian SME ecosystem. Their recent expansion into advanced manufacturing and investor readiness makes them a versatile partner who can bridge policy-level innovation support with practical company-level transformation.

Highlights from their portfolio

• ADMA TranS4MErs
  Their largest single EC contribution (EUR 103,933) and a strategic pivot into advanced manufacturing, marking a significant expansion beyond traditional SME coaching.
• InReady
  Self-coordinated project designing an investor readiness web tool for startups, showing LIC's ambition to create scalable digital service products rather than just deliver coaching.
• LAST-JD-RIoE
  An unexpected outlier — a joint doctoral programme on IoT law and bioethics, suggesting LIC has connections to legal-tech academia beyond their core innovation support work.