Innowwide call for market feasibility projects

Innowwide webinar for applicants

16 July 12:00 PM

Register here

A market feasibility project includes preliminary technical, market, legal and/or socioeconomic assessments intended to validate the feasibility of your international and innovative business solution (product-, process- or service-market combination) within new and emerging global value chains.

Your market feasibility project must:

• Have a target country (a pilot market) where you intend to develop and validate your innovative business solution in collaboration with local counterparts. You should consider, where appropriate, frugal innovation.
• Be led by an innovative SME from a European Union Member State or Iceland, Israel, Norway, Türkiye or United Kingdom.
• Have one local partner (e.g., a supplier, customer, end user, research provider or complementary technology developer) in the selected target country, as main subcontractor for the market feasibility project. The expected outcome must have a high impact in the target country (pilot market).
• Feature product- (or process-, or service-) market development.
• Include a variety of activities to identify and assess key local technical and market framework conditions in the target country that may favour or impede the effective deployment of your innovation.

The third Innowwide call has 4.2 million euro budget to fund 70 projects (60,000 euro per market feasibility project).

This call for projects is bottom-up; you decide the focus of your project.

Innowwide is mono beneficiary. The programme supports the organisation in the EU member state, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Türkiye or United Kingdom, but entities in target countries that SMEs choose to collaborate with can benefit indirectly as subcontractors.

The subcontractors are not party to the grant agreement i.e., they do not have a contractual relationship with the Funding Authority.

The Innowwide financial support rate is up to 70% of minimum eligible costs (personnel, subcontracting, purchasing costs – travel and subsistence, equipment depreciation, other goods, works and services; and indirect costs (automatically calculated on the basis of a 25% flat-rate of the total direct eligible costs, excluding subcontracting)) of 86,000 euro.

Each successful market feasibility project will receive a fixed grant of 60,000 euro. The funding to each SME market feasibility project coordinator will be processed as follows:

1. A pre-financing of 70% (42,000 euro) provided at the beginning of project implementation;
2. The remaining 30% (18,000 euro) transferred at the end of the market feasibility project after its obligatory 6 months duration, upon delivery and acceptance of a complete Final Report by the Eureka Innowwide team. If the report is not acceptable, the market feasibility project beneficiaries could be requested to present additional information within one month. Should the information provided still be insufficient, the grant could be reduced or the market feasibility project could be declared as withdrawn and the beneficiaries required to repay the pre-financing.

To apply, you must fulfil nine eligibility criteria:

• The application is complete. It includes the application form itself, the annex (workplan) in the template provided and all declarations, including your main subcontractor’s commitment.
• The applicant SME is a legally constituted SME according to EU recommendation 2003/361, in an eligible country participating in Innowwide (EU members states, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Türkiye or United Kingdom).
• The project includes an independent subcontractor (local counterpart) in the target country.
• The project has an exclusive focus on civil applications
• None of the participating organisations have convictions for fraudulent behaviour, other financial irregularities or unethical and illegal business practices; is bankrupt or in the process of being declared bankrupt; or is ‘undertaking in difficulty’ according to the EU definition (Article 2, no. 18 of COMMISSION REGULATION (EU) No 651/2014 of June 2014).
• The project duration is six months
• The minimum total eligible project costs is 86,000 euro
• The subcontracting cost are above zero euro
• The project includes a combination of eligible activities

Please read all our guidelines before submitting a project application. If you do not meet all our eligibility criteria, your application will be rejected.

Applications must be completed and submitted on our SmartSimple platform by someone legally authorised to represent the SME based in the EU Member State, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Türkiye or United Kingdom.

Submission steps:

1. Register on https://eureka.smartsimple.ie/. After registering, you will receive an email with the login details. If you have already registered, you can use your login details to access the application form.
2. Complete the application form in English. The online application form allows you to save the draft application so you can return to it later.

• All the application form fields are mandatory.
• After you fill in the project description section, you will be able to invite your counterpart (main subcontractor) to sign a commitment on the platform. Your application won’t be complete until your counterpart has not agreed to the terms set in the commitment and declaration of honour in the SmartSimple platform. Please note that accepting the invitation via email is not sufficient.
• Your application cannot exceed a maximum character length: Each question in the application form will display the maximum number of characters allowed.

3. Upload your workplan, using the template provided.
4. Submit your completed application form electronically before the call deadline.

Once you have submitted your application, you will receive a confirmation email and we will be notified automatically.

You can only submit one application for your company. You may not submit multiple applications with different project goals or targeting different countries. 

Complete and eligible applications are evaluated by three remote experts (one of them acting as rapporteur, responsible for drafting a consensus report), using the online call management platform, according to three criteria: excellence, impact and quality and efficiency of the implementation. Your application is given points out of 100.

Excellence (threshold: 18/30):

• Projects objectives, ambitiousness, and degree of innovation
• Competitive advantage
• Alignment with SME’s overall business strategy
• Co-creation or technology adaptation

Impact (threshold: 24/40):

• Market size
• Impact on end user
• Market access and risk
• Societal, environmental, ethical and gender relevance, in particular, within the frame of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Quality and efficiency of the implementation (threshold: 18/30);

• Capacity and role of the applicant SME and the main subcontractor
• Availability of resources required
• Realistic and clearly defined project management and planning
• Reasonable cost structure

Each expert will prepare an individual evaluation report that includes scores for each criterion with explanatory comments. Once the individual evaluation reports are finalised, the rapporteur will draft an evaluation consensus report and put forward comments that match the consensus scores[1] based on the individual evaluation reports.

The experts who have evaluated each proposal must agree and electronically approve the consensus report, including the comments and scores. In cases where experts do not agree, the consensus report, together with the disagreement notes, will be forwarded to the independent evaluation panel.

The top 105 proposals (one and a half times the total number of projects to be funded) from remote evaluation that score above threshold, progress to the independent evaluation panel and ethics review. If some proposals have tied scores with the 105th proposal, those also progress to the independent evaluation panel and ethics review. 

For proposals below threshold or not in the top 105, the outcome of the consensus phase will constitute the result of the evaluation, and there will be no panel review.

An independent evaluation panel will decide a ranking list based on evaluation results.

An ethics panel review the list of applications that received a successful evaluation, discarding those that do not comply with relevant ethics requirements.

Communication of results:

Each applicant will receive a single evaluation report, including qualitative feedback and scores based on the conclusions of the expert’s assessments.

If your project application was rejected and you believe this was due to a procedural mistake during the eligibility check or the evaluation of your application, you can submit a redress request. A redress request can only be based on procedural grounds, with clear evidence of the reasons for complaint.

Ranking list:

The final independent evaluation panel ranking list and the ethics scrutiny will include:

• a ‘selection list’ with applications that might receive funding;
• a ‘reserve list’ with applications that may in the end get funding if one or more applications in the selection list cannot sign a grant agreement.

Funding will be awarded on the basis of this ranking, subject to the call availability budget.

Following the order set up in the ranking list, the first 70 successful SME market feasibility project coordinators will be sent a Grant Agreement by the Innowwide team at the Eureka Secretariat to be completed and duly signed within the period specified in the notification email. If any of them fail to sign within this period, applicant SMEs in the reserve list following the ranking order will be offered a contract until budget exhaustion.

It is intended to communicate the evaluation results during the first quarter of 2025.

[1] Scores are rounded up.

Learn more about Innowwide on our website.

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