The outcome of the MIT scheme for supporting SMEs’ AI projects is now known. There was a great deal of interest and no less than 85 proposals in total were ranked and reviewed. Twelve proposals will receive subsidies from the subsidy budget of €2.9 million, an important boost for AI projects for and by SMEs.
This scheme, initiated and backed by the Netherlands AI Coalition, was set up in collaboration with the regional organisations. The high level of interest in this scheme provides good foundations for a new call that will be initiated under the AiNed programme of the National Growth Fund that was established by the NL AIC.
The scheme was implemented by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and is financed by the kick-start resources that have been made available by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy.
AI applications directly help economic prosperity, social well-being and solutions to major challenges within society. SMEs – many of which are startups – have an important economic, innovating role. Research has shown that SMEs run up against numerous obstacles when implementing AI. To bridge the gap for SMEs between the knowledge base and implementation in AI innovations, the MIT scheme is also supported by the AiNed programme.
If your AI projects were not selected this round, we would like to invite you to participate again in the next round. It will start in the first quarter of 2023 and will be repeated every year until 2026. You can keep up to date on the AiNed programme via this website.
The proposals receiving the grants are an attractive selection of relevant AI applications that are relevant to all sectors of our society, from intelligent maintenance and automated drone inspections of important infrastructure items, healthcare, greenery in urban planning and analysis of media releases to horticulture and aquaculture optimisation, shipping route optimisation and noise measurement in the built environment. The use of synthetic data (i.e. not personal data) for AI training has been accepted in many applications.
AiNed wishes the authors (Macomi BV, Moos International BV, Deeploy BV, Lucidminds BV, Supplai BV, X-Cago BV, Gearbox Innovations BV, AppBakkers BV, Dashmote BV, LOBSTER Innovations BV, eCONOwind BV and MuniSense BV) and their partners good luck. The Netherlands AI Coalition will follow these projects and we will keep you updated with this information on their progress in the future.
