Posted: 12 / 12 / 2014
HORIZON 2020-SME Instrument – 2.662 proposals received for Phase1
The response to the first round of selection was remarkable, with 2662 proposals from the countries participating in Horizon 2020 (IP/14/876). Out of the 2.666 proposals submitted, 2602 were eligible. Evaluation by independent experts showed that 317 of the proposals met the evaluation standard. Of those, 155, or 49%, have been selected for funding.
Spain had the most projects selected (39) followed by the United Kingdom (26), Italy (20), Germany (11), Ireland (10) and France (9).
Ireland had the greatest success rate (20%) followed by Austria (14,81% - 4 projects pre-selected), the United Kingdom (11,21%), Israel (10,26% - 4 projects selected) and (Spain (9,29%).
The selected SMEs are in a good position to succeed in the second phase of the programme, in which applicants can receive between €0.5 and 2.5 million to finance innovation activities such as demonstration, testing, piloting, scaling up, and miniaturisation. The beneficiaries will also develop their business plan.
Around 645 projects in total should be funded in 2014. This number will rise to 670 in 2015.
While “Health, demographic change and wellbeing” challenge is allocated the highest budget among the H2020 Societal Challenges, it is still possibly the most competitive area. In the one-stage Personalising Health and Care (PHC) call, the chances for funding can go as low as 7%, though for some topics the chances are higher, at the range of 20-30%.
What is more striking is the chances in the two-stage PHC call: If you have been successful and passed onto stage 2, your chances to get your concept funded may still be as low as 6%! (i.e. that is for concepts that have been considered scientifically excellent with a very good potential impact(!). Again, the statistics vary from topic to topic; we can observe that some topics in the work programmes have been significantly oversubscribed by the participants. For example, some topics have received 350-400 proposals, out of which around 150 have passed onto the second stage.
The ranking by country remains the same as in June, with Italy in the lead in terms of number of applications (351), followed by Spain (283), United Kingdom (149), Germany (128), France (93) and Hungary (91).
The Open Disruptive Innovation (ODI) scheme attracted the biggest number of proposals (608), followed by low carbon energy systems (268), nanotechnologies (234) and eco-innovation/raw materials (199).
SME Instrument – 580 proposals received for phase 2
Executive Agency for SMEs received 580 proposals. Of the applications received, 78% were submitted by a single company. In total 785 SMEs are participating in this cut-off.
Ranking by country is similar to phase 1 results – the biggest number of proposals came from Italy - 70, followed by Spain – 69 and United Kingdom with 61 proposals.