No €26,000 in spare cash? What INNOWWIDE co-financing really means

What the €60,000 is measured against

INNOWWIDE Call 5 pays a fixed lump-sum grant of €60,000. It is not a reimbursement of whatever you decide to spend. The grant is tied to a project whose eligible budget must reach at least €86,000. The difference, at least €26,000, is the part your company funds itself. That is what the widely used description of roughly 70% support means in practice: €60,000 out of at least €86,000.

Two consequences follow from a fixed figure. A larger project does not bring a larger grant, because the €60,000 does not change. A smaller project does not work either: if eligible costs stay below €86,000, the financial requirement of the call is not met.

There is no €26,000 deposit

Nothing in the call requires a transfer of €26,000 to Eureka, to the programme or to a partner before the project begins. The amount describes the share of the project budget your company must carry and account for over the six months of the project.

The practical question is therefore not whether you hold €26,000 in spare cash. It is whether your company can fund and document at least €26,000 of eligible project activity, and whether it can carry the timing of the payments while the work is delivered.

Which costs can make up your share

The project budget is built from eligible cost categories. Personnel, subcontracting, travel and subsistence, depreciation of equipment used for the project, other goods and services, and eligible indirect costs can all form part of it. Subcontracting costs must be above zero.

The item most founders overlook is their own team. Where members of staff genuinely work on the feasibility study, their eligible personnel costs can count towards the project budget. Where that happens, part of the €26,000 may consist of salary the company is paying anyway rather than new money leaving the business during the project.

The conditions are strict on purpose. The work has to be performed for the project, the costs have to be incurred during the project period, they have to fall into an eligible category and they have to be evidenced in your accounts. Time records, payroll evidence and a cost calculation that follows the official rules are what make the difference when the project is reported and checked.

What does not count

• Costs incurred before the project starts or after it ends
• Costs you cannot evidence with records and documents
• Work that was planned but not actually performed
• Cost categories excluded by the call rules
• Costs belonging to another entity that is not part of the project
• Commercial activity such as a sales campaign, a trade fair stand or a full market launch

Relabelling existing overheads as project costs does not create co-financing. What counts is work done for the project and costs genuinely incurred because of it.

Cash flow: the 70/30 split

The €60,000 is paid in two instalments: €42,000 (70%) at the start of the project and €18,000 (30%) after an accepted final report. Until the final report is accepted, your company carries the project. Over six months that means paying salaries, subcontractor invoices and travel before the full grant has been received.

One question is worth asking before you apply: if the second instalment arrived later than planned, would the project still be completed and reported? If the answer is no, the risk sits with your company rather than with the programme. The award is linked to deliverables and carries accounting obligations and possible checks. It is not unrestricted cash.

When INNOWWIDE is the wrong tool

Co-financing being affordable does not make a project suitable. INNOWWIDE tends to be the wrong route when:

• You need money quickly to cover operations. This is a project instrument with reporting obligations, not working capital.
• You cannot identify an independent local counterpart. Every funded project requires a subcontractor established in the target country, independent from your company and committed before submission.
• Your solution is below TRL 4. At least laboratory validation is required by the deadline.
• You want the grant to pay for market entry itself. The purpose is feasibility evidence, not a commercial launch.
• Your target is another European market. The target must be one country in Africa, the Americas, Asia or Oceania.

The target country also has to be checked against the applicant countries and against countries under applicable EU restrictive measures. The United Arab Emirates and Lebanon fall within the geographic scope of the call, subject to sanctions compliance being verified for the specific country and counterpart at the time of application.

How to decide in two weeks

Most of the uncertainty can be resolved before any writing begins:

1. Confirm the legal entity date (on or before 1 December 2024) and that the company has not received INNOWWIDE funding in the 2022-2025 calls.
2. State your TRL at home and the expected TRL in the target market. The call requires at least TRL 4 and no more than TRL 8 in the target country.
3. Name one target country in Africa, the Americas, Asia or Oceania and check it against the call rules and applicable EU restrictive measures.
4. Identify a genuinely independent counterpart there and confirm that it will accept the commitment in Eureka SmartSimple.
5. Build a six-month work plan with at least one eligible activity from each mandatory category: co-creation and technology uptake, market research, compliance verification.
6. Draft the budget on an eligible cost basis and test whether it reaches €86,000, with at least €26,000 carried by the company.
7. Stress-test the cash flow against the 70/30 payment split and ask what happens if the second instalment arrives later than planned.
8. Take the go or no-go decision before the deadline of 1 December 2026 at 14:00 CET.

If the answers hold, the co-financing question usually stops being a blocker. If they do not, the honest conclusion may be that another instrument fits your profile better, and that is worth knowing before you spend weeks on a proposal.

What we do, and what we cannot promise

We assess whether the company, the innovation, the target market, the counterpart and the budget stand up against the call rules, and we say so when the answer is no. Where INNOWWIDE fits, we can scope the work packages, the counterpart role and the application as a separate assignment.

What we cannot do is guarantee eligibility, selection or funding, and no adviser can. Eureka expects more than 900 applications for around 70 awards in this call. Treat any award as uncertain until a grant agreement exists.