LISA’s brief, illustrated guide to the pros and cons of public support for small enterprise booster endeavors in the European Union.

You are a small- or medium-sized enterprise (SME in Euro-acronymy - said to describe companies with a workforce of less than 500. Average size is in fact six employees). You would like to benefit from European Union funding opportunities to boost your business reach, develop an innovative product or service, pursue an R&D project, or play a more visible role in national and regional business community building in your sector.

You’ve heard that there is public money around to help the 20 million or so SMEs that provide two-thirds of Europe’s private employment. And you are particularly interested in anything that can beef up your bid to either support global business (for example, because you offer an innovative localization product or service) or be supported by specific actions (because you need to globalize, even if that simply means inside ‘global’ Europe). So what’s on offer from European public funding, aka the European Commission (EC)?