The Ministry of Industry and Trade has announced the already announced Call VI of the Potential Program, which is intended to support investments in research and development. The call is suitable for projects of establishment or development of technology centers. Such investments may include the acquisition of property, plant, machinery and equipment and other development equipment. From the entire OP PIK portfolio, this is a subsidy title where a high aid intensity of 50% is intended for all applicants regardless of the size of the enterprise.
The terms of the call and the particulars of the grant application are identical in this call to the previous call. It should be noted here that large enterprises can also take part in the calls if their project has positive environmental impacts, where the application must quantify the impact on the low carbon economy in CO2 or CO2 climate or methane emissions or other relevant energy indicators or quantification / description of water savings. The second option for large enterprises is contractual cooperation on the project with an SME.
Investments financed from the Potential program must be used only for R&D and not for production. If they are also to be used for production, then the aid applicant has to determine the ratio of ‘development / production’ to which the investment will be used. According to this ratio, the amount of eligible eligible expenditure to be reimbursed is then reduced (only the development part is reimbursed).
A certain advantage is that the application itself does not require the submission of specific documents. In particular, it is essential to prove experience with the implementation of projects (developmental and ideally also grant), either individually or in cooperation. It is also important to demonstrate the current level of cooperation with the university sector and research institutions and to demonstrate future plans in this regard. Also important is the description of the application of market development outputs and their market potential. The market analysis is given considerable importance here.
Looking at the statistics, it is clear that even in this program there is an excess of allocated funds for the call over their real expenditure for individual projects. In the previous call out of the total allocation of CZK 1.3 billion, only about CZK 600 million is distributed to projects that have concluded a Grant Decision. To date, a little over CZK 4 million has actually been paid into the accounts of entities.
I would like to state that in general there is sufficient financial resources from subsidy sources in circulation, all that is needed is to be able to correctly say about them (and this applies to almost all OP PIK programs). The Potential Challenges are wheeled. The emphasis here is not on the race against time, but rather on the quality of submitted applications (the number of points scored is not the time of submission).
Essential data for the call:
– Aid intensity (EU co-financing) – 50% for all sizes of enterprises
– Project grants up to CZK 30 million
– Total allocation of call CZK 1 billion
– Project deadline 31.12.2022
– Receiving applications from 01.10.2019
– Receipt of applications by 16.12.2019