First Eurostars Call 2022

The mission of Eureka’s Eurostars-3 programme is to support innovative SMEs to develop products, processes and services and bring them to the market through funding market-led, cross-border, R&D&I collaborative projects and connecting to accompanying measures enabling:

• Access to new knowledge, and high quality, mutually beneficial collaborations;
• Faster time to market;
• Access to new markets or value chains, leading to improved market share and sales for Eurostars SMEs;
• Business growth and scale-up, leading to increased employment and turnover.

Eurostars will mainly focus on innovative SMEs with the ambition to actively pursue collaboration activities that result in business innovation for the benefit of the SMEs.

According to the EU definition, any entity engaged in economic activity, irrespective of its legal form, is considered an SME, if it employs less than 250 full-time-equivalent persons and has an annual turnover not exceeding EUR 50 million, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 43 million. The Oslo Manual definition for innovation will be applied: a business innovation is a new or improved product or business process (or a combination thereof) that differs significantly from the firm’s previous products or business processes and that has been introduced on the market or brought into use by the firm. 

The programme follows a market-driven approach and has the ambition to introduce R&D results to the market or clinical trials, latest two years after project completion.

Eligibility:

The formal eligibility criteria are:

1. The project is led by an innovative SME from a Eurostars1 country.
2. The project consortium is composed of at least two entities that are independent of one another.
3. The project consortium is composed of entities from at least two Eurostars countries with at least one organisation coming from an EU or Horizon Europe Associated Country2,3.
4. At least 50 % of the total project budget should be incurred on the part of the involved SMEs, excluding subcontracting.
5. No single participant or country is responsible for more than 70% of the project budget.
6. The project duration is 36 months or less.
7. The project has an exclusively civilian purpose.

Funding: 

Innosuisse represents Switzerland in EUREKA’s Eurostars programme and reimburses eligible costs of Swiss project partners as follows:

The funding rate for SMEs, Universities and R&D institutions: max. 50 % of eligible costs

The funding rate for Large Companies: max. 25 % of eligible costs

For more detailed information, click here.

Application process:

For guidelines and detailed information on the call, please click here.