What is our business?

Exploiting the seeds of innovation

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital economic and technological role as generators of innovation, still they often lack the facilities, capability, and time to perform the necessary research that is needed to develop and test their innovative ideas.

Research and technology organisations (RTOs) and universities, on the other hand, have excellent resources and skills but may lack the business expertise found in SMEs.

Against this background, EraSME offers a combined European approach to strengthen and enhance the competitive capacity of SMEs by means of:

• initiating collaboration between SMEs from different countries and regions.
• helping SMEs to link up with those RTOs that can provide help in tackling the SMEs' unique research challenges.
• increasing the cooperative and competitive capability of SMEs to work in international Research and Development (R&D) networks.
• expanding the ability of RTOs to cooperate with European SMEs.

Project participants will be funded according to the regulations of their corresponding national and/or regional programme participating in the EraSME call.

EraSME is funded within the ERA-NET scheme of the Seventh European Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.