New EU Strategy for SME internationalisation

The EC issued a new communication on the internationalisation of SMEs yesterday, 9 November 2011 in which it laid down a new strategy to pave the way for SMEs to expand their business outside the EU. Among the activities are:
1. Strengthening and mapping the existing supply of support services
2. Creating a single virtual gateway to information for SMEs
3. Making support schemes at EU level more consistent
4. Promoting clusters and networks for SME internationalisation
5. Rationalising new activities in priority markets
6. Leveraging existing EU external policies

More on SME internationalisation

Communication text

SME Initiative on Digital Content and Languages - call is now open!

The European Commission is launching the SME Initiative on Digital Content and Languages (Challenge 4 of the FP7-ICT Work Programme) to promote SMEs active in the area of digital content and language technologies.

The new SME-DCL Call makes available 35 MEUR of funding for proposals that must include at least two SMEs (and other types of organisations as appropriate for the proposal). The overall goal is to generate added value from trading, pooling and exploiting data (including language resources) in order to produce novel technologies, products and services.

The submission of the proposal must be done in 2 steps (short proposal and full proposal). The deadline for the short proposal is 28 April 2011 and the deadline for the full proposals 28 September (only proposals retained at stage 1 will be able to go to stage 2).