Finnpartnership offers innovation funding

From the beginning of 2025, Finnish companies can apply for innovation funding from Finnpartnership. The funding enables Finnish companies to co-develop solutions to smaller or larger global challenges with either one or more local partners in developing markets. Developing a solution can be related to products, services, processes or business models.

Finnpartnership’s innovation funding is available to Finnish companies that have been granted Business Finland’s R&D funding. An R&D project can be a recently applied for and approved project, an ongoing project, or a project that has been completed up to five years ago. In 2025, companies whose R&D project has ended in 2020 or later can apply for the funding.

Innovation funding (formerly Business Finland Developing Markets Platform supplementary grant) continues under Finnpartnership in broadly the same form as it has been under Business Finland. The support percentage is 75% for companies of all sizes, and the funding is de minimis aid with a maximum grant of €300 000.

Apply for funding via the Ministry’s e-service

Innovation funding is a new project type in Finnpartnership’s application process. Otherwise, the application process for the funding follows the existing Finnpartnership application procedure. Innovation funding is applied for via the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ e-service. Filling the application requires the ID-number of the associated R&D project. The innovation funding project type is separate from other Finnpartnership Business Partnership Support funding in that it can be applied for even if the company has already received a maximum grant of €400 000 for other project types in an individual target country.

The outcome of innovation funding is not so much directly about decent and sustainable jobs (SDG 8), as in other Finnpartnership project types, but about finding a solution to a global development challenge and developing a suitable solution for it. Therefore, this project type has its own results framework related to generating innovation (SDG 9). An applicant will attach a table to the application that will explain the desired outcome of the project, that being the creation of a solution to a development challenge, and an assessment of the potential future development impact of the new solution created by the project.

To find out more about innovation funding and what kind of work it can include, please visit Finnpartnership’s website and see the just-updated terms and conditions of Business Partnership Support.