Ninety Per Cent Of The Wages

The headline number is ninety per cent. That is the share of eligible project costs the INNO-KOM programme will pay on a pre-competitive research project run by a non-profit industrial research institution inside a structurally weak region of Germany. The cap on the same project is 550,000 euro. The maximum duration is 30 months. The name is short for Innovationskompetenz mit gemeinnützigen Industrieforschungseinrichtungen. The instrument was published in the Bundesanzeiger on 9 January 2023 and entered into force the day after publication. The legal basis is the EU FuEuI-Unionsrahmen C(2022) 7388, Nr 1.3, which covers funding for research organisations inside their non-economic activity. For a single applicant, the arithmetic of one project sits between a small grant and a small acquisition. For an institution that runs four projects a year, the same line is a structural budget. The figure is real. The figure is also time-limited. The instrument runs out on 31 December 2026.

INNO-KOM ships in three modules, each with its own rate, cap and target stage of work. VF, or Vorlaufforschung, covers pre-competitive research built on basic research with industrial application potential. The rate is up to 90 per cent of eligible costs. The cap is 550,000 euro per project. The duration runs to 30 months. MF, or Marktorientierte Forschung und Entwicklung, covers work from a detail concept through to production readiness, with the results transferred to small and medium enterprises. The rate is up to 70 per cent of eligible costs. The cap is 400,000 euro per project. IZ, or Investive Vorhaben, covers scientific-technical infrastructure built to international performance standards. The rate is up to 90 per cent of eligible costs. The cap is normally 250,000 euro per institution per budget year for institutions with fewer than 50 employees, and 500,000 euro per institution per budget year for the others. The investment window ends on 30 November of the budget year. For a small institute running two VF and one MF in the same window, the maximum total award lands near 1.5 million euro. For a larger one with multiple IZ projects, the same arithmetic lands above 2 million euro a year. The module choice is the argument. The award is the consequence.

The applicant must be a legally independent, non-profit industrial research institution. Not a university. Not a state-funded research body. Not an institution receiving more than 20 per cent basic public funding. Not a company. That is a narrower set than it looks. The eligible shape is the institution that sits between a university and a private company, that performs industrial research on contract for small and medium enterprises, and that funds itself primarily through project revenue rather than through basic state grants. The instrument calls this the nichtwirtschaftliche Tätigkeit. The institution must apply the German Transparency Directive analogue, which requires a separated accounting between the non-economic arm and the economic arm. The non-economic arm carries the funded projects. The economic arm carries the contract research at market prices. The line is not optional. Section 4 of the analogue requires the institution to report on the separation. Failure to do so disqualifies the next application. I restructured a industrial group. The separation was the line the auditors kept coming back to. It still is.

The applicant seat, or main branch, must sit inside a structurally weak region, the GA-Fördergebiete of the Joint Federal-Länder Task for the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures, GRW. There is no exception at the seat. If the seat is outside the GA area, the institution must hold a registered branch inside the GA area, on the commercial register or the register of associations. This is the geographic filter most applicants miss. The 89.2 per cent of INNO-KOM recipients in 2022 sat in eastern Germany. That is not an accident of selection. It is the GA map. For a research institute in Hamburg or Munich, the path is to open a registered branch in a GA region. For a research institute in Berlin, the seat itself counts only if the registered address sits inside the structural-weakness classification. The Berlin borough check is its own exercise. The instrument makes the geography explicit. The audit on the next application will too.

The module choice is the argument. The award is the consequence.

The Transparency Directive analogue does the work that separates the non-economic arm from the economic arm. It requires rechnungsmäßige Trennung: a clear accounting boundary between the gemeinnütziger Geschäftsbereich, the non-economic business area, and the wettbewerblicher Geschäftsbetrieb, the competitive business operation. The boundary has to be auditable. It has to allocate cost centres to each arm. It has to allocate staff time to each arm. It has to allocate shared overhead to each arm on a documented basis. For the funded arm, the rule is that all results must be made available to small and medium enterprises on a non-discriminatory basis. For the economic arm, the rule is that commercially used assets acquired through the funded arm are limited to 20 per cent of annual capacity, and that the same assets cannot be leased back to the funded arm. The separation runs both ways. The auditors look at it from both sides.

After the project ends, the obligation runs for six years. The institution must report annual Kennziffern, the indicators, on the institution itself and on each funded project. The reports go to the project carrier on request. Failure to report disqualifies the institution from the next application. The same obligation applies to the funding documents themselves. Original paperwork must be retained for ten years from the date of submission. The ANBest-P-Kosten rules apply. Material changes - a seat relocation, a managing director change, a change of control - must be reported to the project carrier immediately. The audit window is longer than the project window. The first time the auditor reads the file is rarely the last. I signed a personal guarantee on a company that folded on Christmas Day 2008. The lesson from that file: the obligations you accept at signature keep running after the cash is spent.

The instrument runs out on 31 December 2026. Section 8 of the 2023 directive names the date. There is no automatic renewal. The draft BMWE budget for 2027 names 65 million euro for INNO-KOM, against 71.5 million euro for 2026, and the industry association AiF has publicly criticised the cut. For an institution sitting on a half-built VF application, the calendar is the binding constraint. A submission that lands after 31 December 2026 returns as not eligible. The 2027 cut would reduce the available pool by another 9 per cent on top of the deadline itself. The administrative route is now fully digital. From 3 June 2025, applications are submitted through the enconnect.euronorm.de portal, with form versions and annexes tracked on the innovation-beratung-foerderung.de document centre. The project carrier is EURONORM GmbH in Berlin, with the contact line 030 97003-043 and innokom@euronorm.de. The portal is faster than the previous paper route. The only thing faster than the portal is the deadline.

I would fund the eligible shape first, not the project. A non-profit industrial research institution that is not a university, not a state-funded body, not more than 20 per cent state-grant funded, with a seat or registered branch inside a structurally weak region of Germany, with the Transparency Directive analogue already in place and with the six-year reporting history intact - that institution has a real file. The grant is the consequence. A company or a university that wants the same money does not have a file. The application is wasted. The probability that an institution reading this is in the eligible shape is not zero. Most are not. The ones that are know who they are. Entrade built 200 wood-gasification machines across the UK and Europe, and the tenth build looked nothing like the first. The shape of the institution mattered more than the size of the grant. The instrument closes on 31 December 2026. The shape does not.