Closing the finance gap for IPR-driven start-ups and SMEs

The proposed action aims at encouraging innovative SMEs and start-ups to better exploit and promote their innovative assets, as well as building a strategic vision based on their first results that should be easily assessable by the funders.

To achieve this goal, proposals should aim at designing and running a support platform, offering smart online assistance tools that may serve as a pilot test for future bound measures of InvestEU-Advisory Hub and beneficiaries of the European Innovation Council. The platform should team up experts from different backgrounds such as patent engineers, lawyers, industry specialists, finance experts, including National Promotion and Investment Banks, in an attempt to pool their offer.

The platform could contribute to this goal by:

1. Identifying highly innovative European SMEs and start-ups and help them to define the most value-creating business strategy to better value and protect their intangible assets;
2. Identifying and mobilizing

   Innovative European businesses, including start-ups and SMEs, face a real problem to attract suitable financing solutions. Adequate access-to finance is widely considered a key precondition to ensure further growth and development of these companies. One of the major weaknesses of Europe with regard to innovative SMEs lies on the lack of focus on developing intellectual property (’IP’) portfolio strategies to protect their R&D investments and make them more attractive to investors, raise growth capital and remain competitive in Europe and globally.

   Access to finance requires a long and costly work of promotion and exploitation of their innovations to inform and secure commitments by investors.

   Companies tend to suffer from lack of financing and the decoupling between business strategies and the generation of IP assets protecting their R&D.

   This leads to three major challenges for innovative SMEs:

   • Without a sound IP strategy, investors will ask for highe
     • Accompany at least 15 start-ups or innovative SMEs established in at least 10 EU member states or H2020 associated countries.
     • Enable European start-ups and innovative SMEs to protect and enhance the value of their innovations and the attractiveness for investors.
     • Contribute to de-risking access to strategic IP financing for start-ups and SME businesses by decreasing informational asymmetries.
     • Increase the leverage effect of intellectual property assets of the supported SMEs and start-ups.