Insights

Disrupt or Be Disrupted: do you know what will reshape your industry?

More and more brilliant SMEs are set to strengthen European competitiveness with the support of Horizon 2020 SME Instrument programme, Spinverse is delighted to make known yet another customer success story: Finnish company TactoTek secured Horizon2020 SME Instrument financing to revolutionise the way we manufacture electronics for the benefit of the European automotive industry.

According to the recently published statistics from the European Commission, 50 innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from 14 countries have been selected in the latest round of Horizon2020 SME Instrument Phase 2. This time Spain stole the crown with 14 accepted projects, while Finland took fourth spot with 5, after Germany and France with 8 and 6 respectively.

On 6 July, EC published the first results of Horizon 2020 including the statistics of the first 100 calls that closed by 1 December 2014. 36 732 proposals were evaluated by 9 325 experts and about 3 200 projects have been awarded a total of €5.5 billion in EU funding. The overall success rate was about 14% (down from 20% for the whole FP7). France and Belgium had the highest success rates (about 17%). 38% of successful applicants were newcomers, which is a great improvement compared to 13% in the last year of FP7. 40% of newcomers were SMEs and this helped to meet the target of 20% for SME participation (up from 16% in FP7). The SME Instrument introduced in H2020 turned out to be very popular and 5% of the 20% EU financial contribution to SMEs ended up coming from SME Instrument. The popularity - 4 694 new applications  - caused the success rate of SME Instrument to plummet down to 7.3%.