Financial Instruments for Innovation
In its assembly of March 2000, the European Council acknowledged the need of increasing the expenditure in innovation by implementing better policies and making a better use of public funds. To achieve this, the EC has put great emphasis on increasing the use of financial instruments (FIs) as a delivery tool for the Cohesion Policy. Besides the obvious advantages of recycling funds over the long term, financial instruments help to mobilise additional public or private co-investments to address market failures. Moreover, FIs (Guarantees, Business Angels, Venture Capital, Crowdfunding, Crowdlending) have also proved to be a useful tool in helping innovative SMEs overcome the ‘valleys of death’ and reach a sustainable growth phase to become ‘stock exchange listed’ companies.

Under Innova-FI, partners are seeking to improve the design and implementation of Financial Instruments as a delivery mode of Structural Funds, so that they best meet and serve the financing needs of innovative and RTDI-driven businesses in all the stages of their start-up and growth. Innova-FI partners will do this by learning about the innovation landscape, and how it is being publicly financed, in partner regions. The consortium will examine together identified challenges, such as: designing FIs that are well adapted to the different phases of the business; moving away from a grants culture, very much established in the RTDI and innovation field; achieving a better alignment of FIs with other support measures; or creating cross-border instruments.

Our main outputs will be:
- 7 thematic workshops and 7 study visits
-1 Joint Peer Learning 
- 3 policy booklets for governments, compiling case studies and recommendations
- 7 Action Plans
- 2 dissemination events in Brussels to engage with regions outside the consortium
- 1 high-level conference in collaboration with SERN (Start-Up Europe Regions Network)
- Participation of Innova-FI partners at 16 external events (2 events per partner)