Financial support for cutting-edge technology

The Government of Japan is trying to innovate cutting-edge technologies — especially for business relating to IoT, AI and Blockchain. This blog covers one of the subsidy programs that METI (Ministry of Economic, Trade and Industry) offers for technology companies.

新連携支援事業 (Subsidy for new collaboration projects)

This specific program offers up to 30 million JPY budget for a collaboration projects built by more than two SMEs. The coverage is 2/3 for IoT, AI and Blockchain-related projects, and 1/2 for the other tech projects. The budget must be spent within the next two financial years.

Application Period

Until April 21st, 2020 by 5pm JST.

Applicants

1. Must be SMEs (not a large corporation)
2. Two or more SMEs are collaborating together
   *Universities, Research Institutions, Large Corporations or NPOs can be part of the members, but over half of the members must be from SMEs
3. Collaborating with a University, Municipality or Public Testing/Research Laboratory (公設試験研究機関)
   *If an applicant (SME) is already collaborating with these institutions as a part of the team as written in 2., no need to additionally collaborate for fulfilling 3.
4. The main player (SME) must set a goal to grow its own business aside from the project. More specifically 15%+ value added (3% yearly increase in average), and 3.5%+ salary raise (1.5% yearly increase in average) within the next five years
5. Not Yakuza or any Anti-Social members

<WARNING> The following SMEs are not eligible to apply since these are not considered as “SMEs”.

• 1/2 of capital or total shares issued in the company is owned by an associated large corporation
• 2/3 of capital or total shares issued in the company is owned by a large corporation
• 1/2 of the board members are from large corporations, etc.

Applicants MUST do Research and Development activity on the fist year, but the second year can be positioned as growth period — marketing, increasing sales and attending exhibitions!

What kind of project?

The project must strive to pursue these two goals:
1. Successfully launch the new business in a new service providing model
2. Market size of the business will be large, and the project will be most likely turn into a sustainable business through the sales activities

What kind of expense?

1. Fee for researcher (only for R&D purposes)
2. Fee for consultants *aside from the SMEs applying for the subsidy
3. Transportation fee
4. Meeting fee
5. Rental fee for equipments *need contracts and estimates
6. Intellectual Property Rights (Fee for Patent Lawyers or Translation)
7. Staffing fee for the subsidy project (Operational costs)
8. Marketing fee (Exhibition, Market research, PR/marketing)
9. Consumables
10. Purchasing machine, system or equipment
11. Outsourcing analysis work
12. Consignment contract *(11.+12.=up to 1/2 of the entire cost)

What to submit?

• Presentation deck (up to 20 pages/A4) with the following information
  - Name of the project, and the presenter
  - Solutions
  - Market size
  - Business concept
  - Value adding activities
  - How to increase the productivity
  - Business model (innovation, profitability, competitors, market penetration)
  - Timeline of R&D and business
• Presentation movie (less than 8 minutes)
• Application form

Personally, I have never seen a subsidy program that requires a presentation movie, so I’m quite exciting to see what kind of companies apply for it and their presentation videos.

Hope many companies with cutting-edge technology will evolve in Japanese market through this program!