Dear Colleague,

Next week there will be the 1st cut-off date of the H2020 SME Instrument 2016 (Phase 1). The one regarding Phase 2 occurred on 03 Feb 2016 to which 553 proposals were submitted .
Competition in this funding scheme is very hard but also the quality of submitted proposals is often not good enough.

The SME Instrument exceptionally allows SMEs to participate alone (a consortium is not mandatory) and many times they write proposals on their own convinced of saving money. The results are often disappointing in many ways: rules on how to use the proposal template are not followed, too little attention on commercial aspects of the proposed solution, superficial analyses of market competition and, for non-English-native applicants, very often happens that proposals are written in such a poor English that comprehension of the product/solution presented becomes a real challenge.

Last year EPN Consulting launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund a contest aiming to choose the 5 best SMEs ideas received to convert into quality proposals to submit to the SME Instrument in order to help those worthy and ambitious SMEs that couldn't afford pay for professional assistance in this field. Crowdfunders were then rewarded in case of successful results or refunded.

The outcome of this campaign was surprising: no one actively funded this campaign, although it was advertised - and read - on social media and EPN Consulting Newsletters regularly for months.
This was certainly an interesting aspect to assess: people are keen on funding tangible things such as products/objects (e.g. new kind of earphones) but not if intangible activities such as professional services/consultancy are involved.

As a matter of facts, consultancy is still today seen as a service that many reckon to do without, but the reality is that consultants are (or at least should be) those ones who know more of a discipline/field than the rest of us and for this reason should be hired to save time & money. Many companies yet continue to believe they are able to do some activities (out of their field of expertise) on their own, in the evenings or weekends, in a way that in the end doesn't reward.

It is still applicable the saying: "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur" (Red Adair, 1915-2004).