JIC will help Brussels with business support for all European enterprises
JIC (South Moravian Innovation Centre) helps the European Commission to set higher quality of support for innovation businesses. It won together with its partners an order for the so called third phase of the SME Instrument programme. It is about a programme that assigns funds to European enterprises with ground-breaking technologies. The European Commission helps this way to those projects that have a chance to change the market, but, for now, they are at the beginning of their way.
Brussels decided to invest €3 billion into innovative projects until 2020. For the fourth consecutive year already small and medium enterprises with potentially ground-breaking technologies can apply for funding from the SME Instrument program. So far, 9 enterprises in the Czech Republic have obtained the funding of which Enantis of Brno even two times. The Commission now intends to interconnect successful businesses with investors, multinational corporations and public applicants as well and to focus their further development, to be able to launch their innovative products on the market.
Currently, after two phases in operation already it introduces the third programme phase of the SME Instrument. For this purpose Brussels invited in its tendering process consulting and innovative agencies to take part in it. JIC in collaboration with its international partners succeeded in the tender amid of a competition of 13 associations made up of respected organisations across Europe.
“One of the reasons our centre being successful was that we offer under the same roof services for a wide spectrum of companies – from ideas at the outset over scaled start-ups to well-established firms. “Such a model is in the European setting of agencies, concentrating in enterprise promotion, unique,“ explains Petr Chládek, managing director of JIC, one of the key advantages. In addition to JIC, there are more partners from Germany, Great Britain, Belgium and Switzerland involved in the winning consortium.
A community should appear in the following two years that will comprise small and medium enterprises, corporations, investors and public contracting authorities from all Europe. It is about four thousand entities at least that will be interconnected by a digital platform matching individual members according to their fields and needs. The second task of JIC and its partners is to set an educational business academy for the interconnected firms in which they will take up knowledge concerning entry into the market and subsequent stages of their growth. JIC will use at that its experience from its work with small and medium enterprises. More than two hundred companies used the services of JIC in fourteen years of its existence. Needs of Czech businesses become, in this way, one of the guidelines for setting services on the all-European level.
“It is an opportunity to be involved in establishing a structured and interconnected European innovative ecosystem. The community and the academy are for now intended for those companies that succeeded in the first or the second phase of the SME Instrument. But we will be glad, if they open to the most wide range of firms in the future, “ states Jindřich Weiss, team manager for the businessmen promotion. “A series of multinational European projects are for single use only but this one could be in place for many years ahead and have impact on the economical prosperity of the whole Union,“ he adds.
Contact:
Martina Pouchlá, 602 476 863, pouchla@jic.cz
SME Instrument
The SME Instrument is a programme of the European Commission that helps financially to small and medium enterprises in their development through innovations in three stages: feasibility evaluation of the business plan, its realization and launching the output on the market. It is a part of the biggest EU programme supporting projects directed at research, development and interconnected activities of the programme Horizon 2020. So far, the SME Instrument has provided funds to businesses for their first and second phase, the aim of the new project is to provide for launching outputs on the market, thanks to networking and education.
CoCom
CoCom is a consortium of companies that helps to set the third phase of the SME Instrument programme. Apart of SIC, its partners are: German agency EurA Consult, British company YTKO, Belgian agency The Oval Office, Swiss platform platinn and German company CatCap.