The project intends to give a contribution on these issues, capitalising the experience acquired in the frame of EMME project, funded under LLP – Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation.

The EMME project stemmed from the will to transfer the Management Forum initiative, which is an Italian project of analysis, in-depth study and dissemination of management culture, in countries other than Italy, namely in Greece, Spain and Romania, with the aim to adapt the model and make it applicable in different contexts and territories.The structure of the Management Forum is based on four macro areas of activity and related products: Research; Analysis; Good Practices and Dissemination.

The transfer allowed to:

• provide territorial contextualization of management styles;
• define points of strength and weakness of the competences that innovative SMEs’ managers must have for a positive impact on the competitive success of their organization and on local development;
• identify a tool and method for managers’ continuing education consistently with the experimented model and the results achieved.

As a further step, once identified the competences that managers of innovative SMEs should have as a competitive success factor, the recognition, validation and certification of managerial competences in SMEs, achieved through non formal and informal learning, aims to include the EMME model in a lifelong learning process which gives value to all experiences of professional and personal growth of SMEs managers in Europe.

The network project intends to collect, classify and develop innovative European approaches in the field of certification of managerial competences, with the awareness that most competences of SMEs managers are acquired out of a formal learning environment. Furthermore, it intends to devise and test a self-evaluation on line tool as complementary to certification of competence.