The European Commission has chosen 30 European SMEs and tech start-ups which will receive together €90m under its Open and Disruptive Innovation (ODI) scheme over the next 12 months.
Each selected company will be granted €50thousand over the six months at most to help them make their business idea commercially viable. The SMEs, which have been chosen as winners, are on average between two to five years old and are based in Austria, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey and the UK. They have been chosen from over 800 proposals.
In the coming months the EC says it will announce more winners on three separate occasions who will next share further €43m of EU funding earmarked to support the tech SMEs from "concept till commercialisation", it says.
“I always believed SMEs generate the kind of innovative ideas that bring growth and jobs, the ideas Europe needs today. This new instrument was created to precisely unleash this potential, to allow individual SMEs access funding that can allow them make their brilliant idea a reality. I want to congratulate the first set of winners and invite more of Europe’s innovators to come ahead,” says Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President.
ODI is an ICT-dedicated funding scheme under ‘Horizon 2020’ that aims to transform disruptive ideas into innovative solutions such as products, services and models and create new markets.