The European Defence Fund 2022 will offer many opportunities for the defence industry companies. The projects are divided into capability development and research projects, each with their own special characteristics. We estimate that the call texts for this year’s European Defence Fund application round will be published in June 2022.
Is your organisation looking into participating in the upcoming EDF call? Funding experts at Spinverse can support your organisation with both project types; the preparations of capability development as well as those for the research project proposals.
Regarding capability development projects, in most cases the Ministries of Defence (MoD) in their respective countries have already expressed their interest to support consortiums or projects. As the support and co-financing are essential, at this stage it may be challenging to kick off a completely new project or proposal with which the MoD(s) is not familiar as of yet. Nevertheless, existing consortiums might still look for new partners and especially for companies that affect the funding rate bonuses (SMEs and mid-caps).
For research projects, MoD support is not mandatory and therefore most of the consortiums are still not finalised. The intent is to scale up the concepts studied by the collaborative defence research projects and therefore they could be entry-level EDF projects for many companies. The participation of companies is desirable to ensure the relevance of research and the continuation of the development work after the project. In the research projects, the funding rate is 100 % also for companies.
In particular, the “open” research call topics encourage the driving role of new actors in defence research and innovation. There are possibilities for organisations of all sizes, but consortiums consisting of SMEs have their own dedicated call topic. In “open” research call topics, the MoD support is not mandatory, and applicants can propose a research project concerning any disruptive technology. Therefore, those calls are an excellent opportunity to scale up any disruptive, low technology readiness level military or defence technology.
Considering the large amount of work the EDF proposal and the gathering of its mandatory annex documentation requires, the proposal work should be started as early as possible. Spinverse can support your consortium already from the very first steps of the process.
For more information on our services and how our Defence and Security team can help you, visit our Services section on Defence and Security.
If this sparked your interest, do not hesitate to contact our Defence and Security team to map out your possibilities for growth with the European Defence Fund!
Anu Ilmonen
Senior Manager, Team Leader for Defence and Security team
Tel. +358 400 263 251
anu.ilmonen@spinverse.com