New COSME call Innovation procurement brokers

The European Commission has published a new call under the EU programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (COSME). The call Innovation procurement brokers - COS-LINKPP-IPB-2017 has a budget of € 600,000. The call will be open from September 26, 2017 to November 21, 2017 17:00:00.

This action proposes to bring together potential public buyers, suppliers of innovation (with a special focus on SMEs and start-ups), and potential investors and researchers, with a view to determine projects suitable for public procurement of innovation. Programme funding would include the following activities:

• A Facilitator for networking activities and stakeholders management;
• Logistics, including travelling costs of participants
• The proof of concepts of selected projects
• Stakeholders' costs relating to the participation in the process (the cost of procurement of the relevant goods or services is excluded from this funding).

The facilitator would engage with large buyers and/or aggregators of public procurement to identify a small number of needs (problems). Subsequently, the facilitator would engage the "sources of innovation" (i.e. start-ups, innovative SMEs) through its network and asked them to provide solutions for the identified need. A small number of those solutions would receive funding to develop their competitive ideas to a proof of concept that the enterprises could pitch to the buyers for potential procurement at a later stage.

For more detailed information and documents please click here.

The COSME programme aims to make it easier for SMEs to access finance in all phases of their lifecycle - creation, expansion, or business transfer.