Where to find the vital funding for innovation activities, whether it is to finance research, the development of new products, services or solutions, or improvements to be made?
The financing of innovative projects can be classified in different ways: according to the sources of financing, according to the modalities, according to the companies and the projects they address.
The main sources of funding for innovation are shareholders and equity (self-financing), lenders, national public structures or bodies, funding by European or global structures or bodies, partial or total funding by customers.
Each funding source will agree to fund different activities for different amounts and will subject applications to its own procedures before selection and acceptance.
Without claiming to be exhaustive on the subject, we can list
- Contributions of funds from the first circle of shareholders of a startup: “love money
- Honorary loans from specialised organisations
- Subsidies, recoverable advances and interest-free loans (from BPI France for example)
- Fiscal and social aid such as the CIR (research tax credit) and the CII (innovation tax credit) in France
- Bank financing
- European funding for innovation
- Opening up capital by calling on business angels, seed capital, venture capital
It should also be mentioned that in the B2B/B2G high-tech sector, many innovative projects and products are financed by the clients themselves or co-financed with the clients. This type of financing, which is common in large groups, makes it possible either to finance or co-finance a specific project of interest to a single client or to pool development costs between the company and several of its clients, sometimes over successive projects. This particular method of financing or co-financing obviously involves negotiations, often arduous, on intellectual property.
