Proposal template
(Technical annex)
SME instrument – phase 2
 [Adapted for EIC]

Proposals shall be based on a on a strategic business plan developed through SME instrument phase 1 support or by other means. 
Please follow the structure of the template when preparing your proposal. It has been designed to ensure that the important aspects of your innovation and planned work are presented in a way that will enable the experts to make an effective assessment against the award criteria. 
If you upload a proposal longer than 30 pages (only sections 1-3, including cover page and executive summary) before the cut-off date, you will receive an automatic warning and will be advised to shorten and re-upload the proposal. After the call cut-off date, excess pages will be automatically made invisible and will not be taken into consideration. 
Please, do not consider the page limit as a target! It is in your interest to keep your text as concise as possible, since experts rarely view unnecessarily long proposals in a positive light.
Please, do not consider the page limit as a target! It is in your interest to keep your text as concise as possible, since experts rarely view unnecessarily long proposals in a positive light.
Please respect the following formatting constraints:
–	Times New Roman, Arial or similar, at least font size 11, page size A4, margins (2.0 cm side and 1.5 cm top and bottom), at least single line spacing.
Further guidance is available in the Guidelines for Applicants.

I. Cover Page
o	Title of proposal
o	Acronym of proposal
o	List of participants
o	Fill in the table (use the same participant number as the one used in the administrative proposal forms) 
Participant number 	Organisation name	Country	
(Coordinator)			

II. Executive Summary (1-page maximum)

III. Content
1. Excellence
o	Challenge and solution
•	Describe the identified customer pain point? What is the business need, technological challenge or market opportunity? 
•	What is your innovation? 
•	What is the market's state-of-the-art? How would your innovation compare with available solutions, practices or products (e.g. performance, costs, ease-of-use, gender dimension, climate change or environmental aspects, benefits to society)? 
o	Approach 
•	What is unique in your approach, compared to those of other companies?
•	Why now? Explain the historical evolution of your category and define recent trends that make your solution possible.
•	What is the current development stage of your innovation? Refer to Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) or something analogous for non-technological innovations (see General Annex G of the Work Programme).
•	Which milestones led to the current development stage (e.g. proof of concept completed, early field trials under way)? Describe the results obtained on the technological, practical and economic feasibility of the innovation.
•	What are the further stages and activities needed to commercialize your innovation and which of these activities do you intend to perform in this Phase-2 project? 
•	What are the expected outcomes of this Phase-2 project and the related success criteria?

2. Impact
o	Entering the market 
•	Who are the targeted users and/or customers and why will they want to buy your product/service (unique selling point)? Are they new or already part of your customer base? What is your relation with them (e.g. market survey, testing/feedback, letters of intent)? 
•	What is the market in terms of type (e.g. niche, /high volume, new/mature, growth rate), size (e.g. volume, value, geographical scope) and growth? What is your targeted market share?
•	Who are your main direct and indirect competitors? (Competitors, substitutes and alternatives). 
•	Which are the barriers to entry? How do you intend to overcome them? 
o	Business model 
•	How does this innovation fit with your company's overall business strategy? 
•	Describe your value chain. Identify which of these or other stakeholders should be involved to ensure successful commercial exploitation. Define the nature of your current relation with them.
•	Outline your business model, including the revenue model and your commercialization plan with an approximate time-to-market or deployment. 
•	Why is your model scalable? How do you intend to scale-up and reach European and/or global markets? 
o	Financing
•	What is the company's ownership and capital structure?
•	What would be the impact of your innovation on the company financials (profit/loss, turnover and cash flows), jobs and efficiency/productivity improvement in the 3 years following the launch of this Phase-2 project? 
•	Indicate the estimated funding requirements and the timeline to reach the commercialization stage of your innovation. How you intend to finance the 30% co-financing rate? Outline your plans to ensure the subsequent financing of your innovation (next rounds, top-up financing, etc.).
o	Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and legal framework
•	Describe the legal and regulatory requirements to be fulfilled for the exploitation of your innovation and whether it is incorporated in or compliant with standards relevant to the technology.
•	What are your IPR assets? Describe the key knowledge items and who owns them and who else may have rights to use them; patents (applied/granted) or other ways of protection.
•	What is your strategy for knowledge management and protection?
•	What are your measures to ensure commercial exploitation ('freedom to operate')?
o	Communication and access to research data
•	How will you publicly communicate about your innovation during the period of the grant? Where relevant, mention measures for public/societal engagement on issues related to the project. 
•	If relevant, how will you manage/exploit/share the research data generated and/or collected during the project?  What are the types of data and standards to be generated/collect? How will this data be curated and preserved and what are the costs involved? If data cannot be made available for commercial reason, explain why.
•	If relevant, what are the measures to provide open access (free on-line access, such as ‘green’ or ‘gold’ model) to peer-reviewed scientific publications to result from the project? 
  Actions under Horizon 2020 participate in the extended ‘Pilot on Open Research Data in Horizon 2020 ('open research data by default'), except if they indicate otherwise ('opt-out'.).Once the action has started (not at application stage) those beneficaries which do not opt-out, will need to create a more detailed Data Management Plan for making their data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).  

3. Implementation
o	Team 
•	Describe your team and their achievements and experience in relation to the approach you will be taking. 
•	Describe the roles of the team within your project.  What is the role of the company's owner(s)? What are the main strengths and weaknesses of the team?
•	If your project is to be implemented by a consortium, describe how the partners complement each other.
o	Work packages, deliverables, milestones, risks
•	Describe the overall structure of the work plan.
•	Explain the timing of the work packages and their components (include a Gant chart or similar).
•	Present a detailed work description:
i.	List of work packages (table 3.a)
ii.	A description of each work package (table 3.b)
iii.	List of major deliverables (table 3.c)
•	Include a list of milestones (table 3.d)
•	What might go wrong? Include a table with critical risks identified and mitigating actions (table 3.e). Explain your approach to the proposed mitigation measures.
Work package means a major sub-division of the proposed project.
Deliverable means a distinct output of the project, meaningful in terms of the project's overall objective. It can be a report, a document, a technical diagram, a piece of software etc.
Milestones are control points to help to chart your progress. Milestones may correspond to the completion of a key deliverable. They may also correspond to other inputs, allowing the next phase to begin, to decide on further steps or to take corrective measures. 
o	Resources
•	What are the resources, equipment and facilities required for the project and how you will access them? Would you need additional resources for scaling-up your business? Please provide the following:
i.	a table showing number of person months required (table 3.f)
ii.	a table showing ‘other direct costs’ (table 3.g) for participants where those costs exceed 15% of personnel costs (according to the budget table in section 3 of the proposal administrative forms)

Table 3.a: 	List of work packages
Work package No	Work Package Title	Lead Participant No	Lead Participant Short Name	Person Months	Start Month	End month	

				Total months			

Table 3.b:	Work package description 
For each work package:

Work package number 		Lead beneficiary		
Work package title		
Participant number							
Short name of participant							
Person months per participant							
Start month		End month 		

Objectives 

Description of work (where appropriate, broken down into tasks), lead partner and role of participants

Deliverables (brief description and month of delivery)

Give full details. Base your account on the logical structure of the project and the stages in which it is to be carried out. Include details of the resources to be allocated to each work package. The number of work packages should be proportionate to the scale and complexity of the project.

You should give enough detail in each work package to justify the proposed resources and also quantified information so that progress can be monitored, including by the Commission.

Resources assigned to work packages should be in line with their objectives and deliverables. You are advised to include a distinct work package on ‘management’ and a distinct work package on 'commercialisation (dissemination and exploitation)' and communication activities. 

If your project is taking part in the Pilot on Open Research Data, you must include a 'data management plan' as a distinct deliverable within the first 6 months of the project. A template for such a plan is given in the guidelines on data management in the H2020 Online Manual. This deliverable will evolve during the lifetime of the project in order to present the status of the project's reflections on data management.

Table 3.c:	List of Deliverables
Deliverable (number)	Deliverable name	Work package number 	Short name of lead participant 	Type	Dissemination level	Delivery date ( in months)

							

							

Number the deliverables in order of the delivery dates. Please use the numbering convention <WP number>.<number of deliverable within that WP>. For example, deliverable 4.2 would be the second deliverable from work package 4.

Type: use one of the following codes: 
R:	Document, report (excluding project periodic or final report) 
DEM:	Demonstrator, pilot, prototype, plan designs 
DEC:	Websites, patents filing, press & media actions, videos, etc.
OTHER: Software, technical diagram, etc.

Dissemination level: use one of the following codes: 
PU:	Public, fully open, e.g. web 
CO:	Confidential, restricted under conditions set out in Model Grant Agreement	
CI:	Classified, information as referred to in Commission Decision 2001/844/EC. 

Delivery date: measured in months from the project start date (month 1)

Table 3.d:	List of milestones
Milestone number	Milestone name	Related work package(s)	Due date (in month) 	Means of verification	

					

Due date: measured in months from the project start date (month 1)
Means of verification: show how you will confirm that the milestone has been attained. Refer to indicators if appropriate. For example: a first product that is ‘up and running’; software released and validated by a user group; certificate attained. .

Table 3.e:	Critical risks for implementation 
Description of risk
(indicate level: Low/Medium/High)	Work package(s) involved	Proposed risk-mitigation measures	

			

Critical risk: a critical risk is a plausible event or issue that could have a high adverse impact on the ability of the project to achieve its objectives.
Level of likelihood to occur: Low/medium/high. The likelihood is the estimated probability that the risk will materialise even after taking account of the mitigating measures put in place.

Table 3.f: 	Summary of staff effort

Number of person months over the whole duration of the planned work, for each work package, for each participant. Identify the work-package leader for each WP by showing the relevant person month figure in bold.

	WPn	WPn+1	WPn+2	Total Person/
Months per Participant	
Participant Number/Short Name 					
Participant Number/Short Name 					
Participant Number/Short Name 					
Total Person/Months					

Table 3.g:	‘Other direct cost’ items (travel, equipment, infrastructure, goods and services)
Please complete the table below for each participant if the sum of the costs for’ travel’, ‘equipment’, and  ‘goods and services’ exceeds 15% of the personnel costs for that participant (according to the budget table in section 3 of the proposal administrative forms). 
Participant Number/Short Name	Cost (€)	Justification
	
Travel			
Equipment 			
Other goods and services			
Total