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Hermix participates in the Innovation Management for SMEs event organized by the Small Business Standards (SBS)

Posted on 23/05/2024 by Ana-Maria Puiu

Hermix participated in the Innovation Management for SMEs event organized by the Small Business Standards (SBS).

We had such a great collaboration earlier this year when we signed a €920k grant from Eureka Eurostars, in partnership with the University of Luxembourg.

This partnership was fundamental and served as a key factor in ensuring the project’s success. We are also glad to be beneficiaries of additional R&D funds, including, ERDF – ADR-BI, and the EU Datathon award from the Publications Office of the European Union.

Stefan Morcov represented us talking about innovation, SMEs, and public funding.

Our main key points were:

  • Public funds are essential for funding innovation, especially for SMEs and startups.
  • There are huge funds available & spent by gov, incl. public contracts and R&D grants. But it is expensive and difficult to access them => competition is low.
  • There’s a gap between public funds/donnors vs. private beneficiaries.
  • Hermix supports to analyze and organize this info + streamline proposal preparation, through market intelligence, AI/LLM summarization, proposal generation.
  • We submitted 7 grants to win 2 + 1 award. The effort is huge, even with existing expertise.
  • Hermix received incredible support, such as grants from Eureka Eurostars and ERDF, a great award + prize from EC – OP, as well as coaching through EIC.
  • Practical innovation models and frameworks in startups. The difficulty to match formal models (e.g. TRL) with software/research startups, where agile models (SCRUM, Kanban) are a better fit.
  • Private and public efforts should be combined.

The main pains of SMEs are:

  • Finding relevant information. Too much info is available, difficult to analyze/organize.
  • Overhead – incl. effort + cost to access public contracts, implement standards and frameworks (ISO, QA, GDPR, CMM…). Need to prioritize.
  • Access to relevant networking + business opportunities.

About Hermix

Hermix (www.hermix.com) is the first market analytics platform for the public sector. It helps companies win public contracts, with tender monitoring and market intelligence.

Big data is already used heavily in retail, consumer, B2C/B2B. With Hermix, modern analytics is also available to B2G – Business-to-government. It brings public funding into the 21st century.

Hermix won the EU Datathon 2022 competition organized by the European Commission, as well as the Deloitte Impact Star award 2022, the CE Tech Rocketship! award in 2023 from Deloitte and Google Cloud, and the ‘Best Value 2023’ label from Capterra by Gartner.

About Innovation Management for SMEs event

The conference is designed for SMEs that are eager to explore new paths for growth and innovation. Participants have the opportunity to engage with ISO international experts on various topics, including Eureka EU funding, innovation hubs, and open innovations. This is a chance to learn about the different opportunities available for SMEs and how to make the most of them.