Partnership on Innovative SMEs
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent the backbone of the European economy. They represent 99.8% of all enterprises in the European Union (EU) non-financial business sector and two thirds of employment. However, SMEs in Europe face obstacles to growth, expansion and scaling up, including lack of skills, administrative burden, and access to finance. Many lack capacity for innovation and struggle to enter international markets. Greater cooperation with partners in Europe and beyond can help to address many of these issues. However, opportunities for bottom-up, international collaborations are limited.
European SMEs can struggle to find support for their internationalisation efforts. At national level, support is often limited to collaboration among partners within the same Member State.
Levels of investment to support internationalisation in European innovative SMEs vary and there is suboptimal co-ordination of national schemes. Overall, these issues weaken the resilience of the European innovation ecosystem.
The objective of this call is to continue to provide support to the European Partnership of Innovative SMEs identified in the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan 2021-2024 and first implemented under the topic HORIZON-EIE-2021-INNOVSMES-01-01: European Partnership on Innovative SMEs, and in particular to fund additional activities (which may also be undertaken by additional partners) in view of its intended scope and duration, and in accordance with Article 24(2) of the Horizon Europe Regulation. For the HORIZON-EIE-2023- INNOVSMES-01 call, the consortium which applied to and received funding under the European Partnership on Innovative SMEs topic of the European Innovation Ecosystems Work Programme 2021-2022 is uniquely placed to submit a proposal to continue the envisioned partnership.
HORIZON-EIE-2021-INNOVSMES-01-01: European Partnership for Innovative SMEs; The Eureka secretariat is run under the Eurostarts program.
You can find detailed information about the relevant programme from here.
Budget:
EUR 34.54 million for 2023
EUR 36.58 million for 2024
