The opportunities and challenges in supporting business innovators in Bulgaria and the respective financing instruments designed by the FMFIB were presented at a conference organised by the EIB on the occasion of the launch of ‘InnovFin – EU financing for Innovators’, an initiative of the European Commission and the European Investment Fund. The initiative focuses on innovative small and medium-sized enterprises and small midcaps (up to 500 employees), and is backed with funds from Horizon 2020, the EU framework programme for research and innovation.
At the forum, the Chairman of the FMFIB Managing Board, Mr. Martin Danovski described the financial resources from ESIF available to SMEs in Bulgaria which include also financing for research, development and innovation. In recent months, the Fund of Funds launched market test consultations for over 80% of the resources in OP Innovations and Competitiveness 2014-2020 allocated to a number of financing instruments which support technology transfer, innovative, start-up and fast-growth businesses. Mr. Martin Danovski noted that innovation financing in Bulgaria will soon be sufficient to enable business to boost its R&D activities and ideas. He concluded that the funds for small and medium-sized enterprises in that area will reach about BGN 1.7 billion in the next 7 to 10 years. In his estimation, those resources can help transform certain qualitative aspects of the economic model in Bulgaria, which would upgrade our small economy with new, smarter opportunities, so that we could respond to the new realities. ‘Let’s take a look at all the sources of such financing together: the grant financing from Operational Programme Innovations and Competitiveness; the recycled funds under JEREMIE which again promote the development of SMEs through venture capital instruments; the new OP Initiative for SMEs which includes attractive guarantee and credit products; the Horizon 2020 Programme, and over 244 million levs in equity instruments for SMEs in the Fund of Funds, and we will see that there are sufficient conditions for such a transformation’.
The event was opened by Mr. Dietmar Dumlich, who is responsible for Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus at the European Investment Bank. He believes it is necessary to increase investments in the private sector since it is important for companies to develop innovations in production technologies.
