Commercialize Your Product and Grow Your Business Globally With a Commercialization Grant?
Do you have a prototype you would like to commercialize? Are you ambitious to bring it to the rest of the world? If this is the case, the EU’s SME Instrument might be for you – a program Switzerland has just joined as of this year.
The SME Instrument
The SME Instrument is a grant offering up to €2.5 million to take your product to market, and covers activities from marketing and prototyping to validation and performance validation. Topics covered range from agriculture and ICT to health and energy or transport, but almost any innovation qualifies as long as it is a highly-innovative prototype with some level of validation and you have the ambition to make a global impact.
The SME Instrument has three phases, outlined below, in which SMEs and scale-ups first receive €50.000 for a feasibility study to examine how and if they wish to commercialize their innovation, before applying for the bigger sum of up to €2.5 million. It is important to mention that Phase 1 is optional, and that it is possible to go directly to Phase 2, but the chances of success are higher if you go through the whole process.
The Keys to a Successful Proposal
Before applying to the SME Instrument, it is important to consider if your innovative product, service, or process makes a good match with the program. This instrument was designed to support innovative SMEs (including startups/scale ups) that have an innovative product at the proper “technology readiness level” – a product that has validation in a relevant environment. SMEs are most successful if they make a strong case that they will have rapid revenue growth upon support from the SME Instrument and if they are tackling a problem applicable across Europe and ideally the world. The “return” that the European Commission seeks consists of more competitive and innovative SMEs, job creation, and increased economic activity – each of these are linked to a case for rapid revenue growth.
Proposals to the SME Instrument are evaluated on a variety of criteria, but “impact” is the most important, as it has a 50% higher weight than all other criteria. What is impact? If you can make the case that your product has the potential to cut cost by 50%, cuts the time to complete a process by a factor of ten, saves lives, decreases impact on the environment or climate, etc. then you are well on your way to making a strong cases for funding from the SME Instrument.
Evolution Europe, You, and the SME Instrument
Evolution helps SMEs and scale ups commercialize innovations by developing go to market plans and leveraging the SME Instrument and network of partners and investors. We take responsibility for writing proposals for Phase 1 and Phase 2, carry out the feasibility study, and do project management over the life of the project so that our clients can benefit from our high success rate (~50% compared to ~8% if you go it alone) and minimize their own administrative and bureaucratic burden. If our editors evaluate your project positively, we are able to support you at no upfront cost, through a national Swiss grant that provides an CHF8.000 incentive for Swiss SMEs applying to the Horizon 2020/SME Instrument for the first time.
Would you like to hear more about the SME Instrument, Evolution’s service, or have your idea’s grant potential evaluated without obligation?
Reach out to:
Jacob Huber
International Business Development Manager
Jacob.Huber@evolutioneurope.eu
