Financial support for start-ups developing IT or biobased innovations

On 5 December the first Swiss FIWARE acceleration conference will be held in Winterthur. FIWARE is a program with €80 million euros of direct funding, mentoring and networking to create innovative Internet application with FIWARE technologies. FIWARE seeks to provide a truly open, public and royalty-free architecture and a set of open specifications that will allow developers, service providers, enterprises and other organizations to develop products that satisfy their needs while still being open and innovative.

The event in Winterthur offers, to SWISS Small Enterprises and WEB entrepreneurs, the opportunity to introduce  project ideas to the professional A16 accelerators. They will guide companies through the difficult time of developing their application and building their business.

The day is structured to :

• provide overall introduction of the main FIWARE Generic Enablers needed to  develop a first application based on FIWARE
• support Small Enterprises  and Web entrepreneurs to apply to the open calls in Dec 2014 and early 2015.

More information on the website of the event.

Financial support up to 30.000€ for SME’s developing biobased innovations
SME’s can now access ‘Innovation Coupons’ worth up to 30.000€ to assess the feasibility of an innovative biobased process at Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant in Ghent, Belgium. These Innovation Coupons are an initiative of Bio Base NWE, a project to support the development of the bio-based economy in North West Europe (NWE). So far, the partnership granted fifteen innovation coupons worth 10.000€ to smaller SME’s to validate biobased ideas. Raising the value of the coupon to a potential amount of 30.000€, provides Bio Base NWE with an extra tool to also assist larger SME’s looking for process-validation and to shorten the time-to-market for biobased innovations in general.

Bio Base NWE is a three-year and € 6,2 million project launched by the European Commission in 2013 to support the development of the bio-based economy in North West Europe (NWE). The Bio Base NWE partnership includes organisations from five different countries and works mainly with small and medium businesses (SME’s) to help facilitate innovation and business development in bio-based technologies.

SME’s can apply for an Innovation Coupon until June 2015, the application procedure is very easy. Interested companies are invited to contact their local Bio-Innovation Agent (www.BioBaseNWE.org) who will guide them through the application process.