C-VoUCHER: designing circular prosperity through the EU funding

European SMEs – especially the traditional ones – face multiple challenges related to resources management, sustainability and efficient organization of value chains. They also lack professional knowledge regarding the optimum design and sustainability in business. At the same time they need to compete with multi-nationals, having wide expertise in majority of topics and funds for improvements. This situation can be solved by a dedicated, circular economy programme offering not only the grants for technology uptake but most importantly a customized support by industrial design experts and regional actors, reshaping the SMEs’ traditional, linear value chains into the circular ones. C-VoUCHER https://c-voucher.com/ – the biggest European acceleration programme with the circular economy focus – is financed by the European Commission and has 4.2 million Euros to support 66 European SMEs. In 2019, C-VoUCHER is launching 2 Open Calls for companies willing to embark on the circular journey. The project is executed by 13 European partners, including regional innovation agencies, corporates and private capital experts. There are 5 prioritized domains: Manufacturing, Health, Textile, Blue Growth and Agro-Food and European SMEs operating within at least one of them can apply to the open calls. The maximum grant of 60k Euros can be spent on enabling technologies, identified by the SMEs together with their allocated designers.