Project description
Facilitating access to finance for innovations with high-growth potential
Money is not always making its way to the real champions of the EU economy. Many innovations with high-growth potential are struggling to find access to finance as investors find it hard to appropriately assess them. The EU-funded InnoRate project will develop new services building on the InnoRate Technology Rating System. The aim is to help assess innovations based on a quick, automated assessment that uses key business and technology indicators beyond typical credit risk metrics (pre-screening). The project will also carry out an in-depth assessment to reveal hard-to-quantify business aspects (deep assessment). The overall aim is to reduce the resources (time, human, financial) required by investors (and by the innovators themselves) for the evaluation of the business potential and risks of innovations.
Objective
InnoRate is set on deploying a trusted, objective and recognised service platform across the EU and AC to support and improve the decision-making processes of investors and lenders for vetting, prioritising and providing access to finance to innovative high growth potential SMEs. The suite of digitally-enabled decision support tools and services provided through our platform are underpinned by well-customised innovation assessment and rating methodologies that go beyond the unsuitable, backward-looking and costly practices currently employed, so as to evaluate and signal the technological and business potential and risks of market-creating innovations, efficiently and cost-effectively. To this end, we leverage semantic technology, existing data sources and in-depth human expertise, to minimise the time and resources (human and financial) required by investors and lenders in this respect, reducing knowledge / information asymmetries and ultimately risk premiums paid by innovative project managers. In doing so, our ambition is clearly to disrupt the largely risk-averse financial sector of the EU and AC, enhancing the innovation capacity of high growth technology sectors and SMEs, paving the way for drastical innovations to flourish and placing Europe in the forefront of the global innovation game. To put it simply, we want to bring innovation to finance and finance to innovation.
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CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
551 33 Kalamaria, Thessaloniki
Greece
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.