Finnish innovation voucher scheme launched for renewable energy service innovators

With up to 50.000 EUR funding from TEKES for renewable energy service innovators, the Finnish innovation vouchers represent a true opportunity for SMEs keen to get external expertise to support their innovative ideas.

The basic idea of the innovation vouchers is to enable SMEs to access external knowledge.

This 1st generation of innovation vouchers supported technology cooperation between SME and research centres. Such vouchers exist since 2004 in the Netherlands. Other countries and regions have also started setting up thier own voucher schemes recently, such as Ireland, Austria or number of regions in the UK.

Recently, a few innovation agencies are trying out vouchers that allow to access business expertise. They put SMEs in contact with innovation consultants. External support via these new vouchers mostly consists in a full risk assessment for an innovation project followed by management recommendations. For example, a company keen to launch a new service can get an external expert to look into the market, managerial, financial and IPR risks that are related to launching the new service.

The new Finnish voucher scheme is one of those. Its development has been supported by the KIS-PIMS project (CIP - Europe Innova - Knowledge Intensive Services) where partners from France, Finland and Austria develop and test such 2nd generation innovation vouchers allowing access to business expertise.

We shall report about the Finnish system in detail soon. For the time being, here is the weblink at the Finnish innovation agency TEKES with details about the calls in Finnish: 

http://www.tekes.fi/ajankohtaista/hakuajat/hakuaika_tiedot.asp?id=7008