The Ministry of Industry and Trade is supporting companies that are introducing innovations into practice in order to combat the coronavirus. The ministry announced the second public tender in The Country for the Future programme within subprogramme 3 – Innovations in Practice.
The programme, which was approved by the government last year, has been focused since the beginning on the introduction of innovations with emphasis on current trends in the area of digitalisation and automation in small and medium-sized companies. “Small and medium-sized enterprises are now the most vulnerable. However, a number of them are able to offer useful solutions that can help our whole society to cope with the impacts of the crisis or can be of some assistance in introducing business processes that will limit similar threats in the future both for the health of employees and for the management of companies,” says Petr Očko, Deputy Minister for Digitalisation and Innovation, adding: “Therefore, we have prepared a specifically focused tender that is open to innovative projects of companies in all economic sectors, where we are enabling relatively rapid drawing of aid for projects of up to three years in duration. It is possible to commence work on projects immediately after submitting the application. The results of the tender will be released by 31 August of this year at the latest.”
Project in, for example, the fields of medical technology and applications that bring forth new or significantly improved production processes or provision of services can be supported within the tender. Furthermore, projects in all sectors of business focusing on the introduction of innovative operational or logistics processes that reduce the risk of spreading infectious diseases can also receive support. This particularly refers to projects that increase the degree of digitalisation and automation and the ability of an organisation to flexibly respond and adapt to similar extraordinary situations. “It will be possible to apply a broader spectrum of cost items, including the cost of preparing the project application, and to allow a lower rate of co-financing of costs from the recipient’s own resources. With the full use of de minimis support, the aid amount can now be as high as 75% of the given project’s eligible costs,” says Petr Očko, Deputy Minister for Digitalisation and Innovation.
More information is available in the attached press release from the Ministry of Industry and Trade.