The program provides funding for R&D projects aiming to;
- develop or upgrade new products
- develop new techniques to save the cost and/or increase the quality and standard of a product
- develop new production technologies
75% of eligible expenditures is reimbursed. The expenditures (personnel costs, travel costs, equipment/tool/hardware/software costs, consulting/outsourced services costs, material costs) incurred during the R&D Project stages below are reimbursed following the assessments made for project monitoring. It is expected that the projects should consist of all or some of the stages listed below;
a) Concept development,
b) Technological / technical and economic feasibility study,
c) Laboratory and similar studies required from concept to design,
d) Design, application and design verification studies,
e) Prototype production,
f) Installation of the pilot plant,
g) Trial production and type tests,
h) Activities to fix design problems determined in field tests
Investment-intensive projects for production or production infrastructure (including plant and machine tool such as milling machine purchase) and projects that include activities without R&D content are not funded because they do not comply with program objectives.
Projects coming from 1512 Entrepreneurship Multi-phase Programme get additional reimbursement for the overhead costs (10% of eligible expenditures). Also they have the right to receive advance payment more than once.
Total Project Budget and Project Duration cannot exceed 1.200.000TL (except overhead costs) and 18 months.
All projects accepted for funding after evaluations will be supported with no restriction based on region, sector or scale of the applicant SMEs unless otherwise is stated in the Project call. The SMEs have the right to benefit from the support for their first five projects. At least two of these five projects must be partnership projects.