The Eurostars program is a European innovation program, which aims to provide funding for R & D market-oriented and actively participated by SMEs.
Created jointly by the Eureka initiative and the European Commission through Horizon 2020, which aims to support small and medium enterprises (although they may also participate universities, research centers, etc.) in the development of products, services and / or innovative processes in which technology plays a key so that they can be introduced and sold in the market and thus boost the competitiveness of European businesses pillar.
For the period in which falls the 2015 (2014-2020) program called Eurostars-2 and has a budget of almost 1,200 million euros, of which 25% come from the Europe Commission and the remaining 75% It is provided by the Eurostars countries (34 in total).
The profile of companies to access this public financing would be SMEs specialized in R & D (investing at least 10% of its revenues in R & D or spend 10% of their staff to innovation activities and development) go consortium requires at least two independent European companies.
The grant is repayable managed at national level in Spain it is up to 60% of the budget if they are small companies, 50% if they are medium enterprises and 40% if they are small businesses. Up 100% to complete the consortium.
The development time of such projects is usually between 18 and 24 months (36 months is the maximum) with an average budget of 1.5 million euros.
Also unlike Eurostars, the current program will now consider the costs of project evaluation and administrative costs and not as operating costs.
In Horizon 2020, the essential aim of Eurostars 2 is to stimulate economic growth and job creation by promoting the competitiveness of R & D carried out by SMEs through transnational collaborative R & D.