New Video: Horizon 2020 Opportunities for SMEs

A new video featuring an interview with Eurice CEO Jörg Scherer provides practical tips and tricks on how to strategically use Horizon 2020 for SME business development.

Are you a highly innovative, ambitious and passionate small or medium-sized business with global ambitions? Are you looking for excellent research and business collaborations - and substantial funding from Horizon 2020 wouldn't hurt either?

Horizon 2020 stimulates SME participation across the whole programme, yet with a particular focus on close-to-market support. If research and development activities are not translated into innovation, i.e. value creation from novelty, SMEs cannot take profit from those activities. Great ideas need to be picked up by users, customers and the market before they can really transform society.

Overall, it is expected that 20% of the total combined budget for all Societal Challenges and the specific objective Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies (LEITs) will go to SMEs. This means that over EUR 8 billion in EU support for Research and Innovation activities will find its way directly to SMEs, most of them part of consortiums participating in EU collaborative Research and Innovation projects. Halfway the programme - i.e. in July 2017 - SMEs had received about EUR 3.5 billion in grant money from the about EUR 14.25 billion awarded under Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges and LEITs. With that, the 20% target was exceeded by more than 4%.

The video has been produced within the EU-funded project Fit for Health 2.0.