About the BICS
European Community Business & Innovation Centres – or EC BICs as they are officially known – are support organisations for innovative small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and entrepreneurs. They are recognised by the European Commission through a quality certification scheme, which enables them to obtain the European "EC-BIC" label.

Global mission
BICs are business and innovation support instruments assisting regional and local economic development. Their role is to support the creation of new innovative firms and to help existing firms to modernise and innovate, throughout a complete set of incubation services within an internationalisation context.

Core business services
The pillars of BICs' services are:

• the promotion of entrepreneurship
  • the pro-active detection of innovative projects (individual and collective projects from entrepreneurs, SMEs and researchers)
  • strategic guidance before, during and after start-up phase (incubation and follow-up)
    • during incubation (risk analysis, business planning support, mentoring, access to financing)
    • follow-up after creation (post incubation) with a focus on financial engineering and hands-on strategic guidance and operational support
• providing innovative firms with physical incubation facilities and related services
• supporting innovative firms in the internationalisation process
• providing innovative firms with technological and marketing assistance
• academic spin-off and industrial spin-out engineering
• organising training courses for innovative entrepreneurs
• supporting co-operation (including clustering) between innovative firms
• sign-posting towards existing service providers and other support organisations, as well as the building of an external talent pool are recommended

The European networking dimension
EC BICs are collectively represented by EBN, the European BIC Network, based in Brussels, whose aim is to develop, co-ordinate and promote the growth of the BIC network within and outside the European Union. Since its creation in 1984, EBN has grown substantially and there are now 160 BICs (full members) in 21 countries as well as 60 additional associate members who share the same objective of SME support and development.