Funding Opportunities to Prepare for After Summer: SLIM, MIT and INNOWIDE

For start-ups and SMEs, summer can be a good moment to take a step back and look ahead.

While daily operations may slow down slightly, the second half of the year often brings new opportunities to invest in your team, validate innovation plans, and prepare for international growth.

Growth is rarely just about having a strong idea. It is also about building the right capabilities, testing the right assumptions, and knowing when to make use of available support.

Whether you are developing your team, exploring the feasibility of an innovation project, or preparing to enter a market outside Europe, subsidy schemes can help reduce financial pressure and create room to move faster.

In this update, we highlight three funding opportunities and subsidy routes to have on your radar after summer: the SLIM subsidy, MIT Feasibility Projects and INNOWIDE.

SLIM Subsidy: Invest in the Development of Your Employees.

Are you planning to invest in the development of your employees? The SLIM subsidy scheme may offer a valuable opportunity to strengthen learning and development within your organisation.

The next application period for individual SME applications opens on 19 August 2026 and runs until 7 September 2026. That means now is the right moment to prepare.

The SLIM subsidy is designed to help SMEs create a stronger learning culture. This can include developing or commissioning a training and development plan, introducing structured development conversations, mapping skills gaps, or setting up practical ways for employees to continue growing within the company.

For many start-ups and scale-ups, this is highly relevant. As a company grows, roles often change quickly. Founders move from hands-on execution to leadership. First hires grow into team leads. New employees need clearer onboarding, guidance and development paths. Without structure, this can easily lead to confusion, duplicated responsibilities, or missed growth opportunities.

A well-designed development plan helps companies answer important questions:

• How do we make sure our team has the right skills for the next growth phase?
• Which roles and responsibilities need to become clearer?
• How do we support employees in their professional development?
• What training, coaching or guidance is needed to prepare the organisation for scale?
• Which capabilities do we need to build now to support future growth?

Through the SLIM subsidy scheme, companies can apply for support to develop or commission a training and development plan. This makes it a particularly interesting opportunity for SMEs that want to professionalise their internal organisation without carrying the full cost themselves.

MIT Feasibility Projects: Lessons from the Latest Round.

The latest MIT Feasibility Project round once again showed how strong the demand for innovation funding is among SMEs. In some regions, including Zuid-Holland, the available budget was significantly oversubscribed.

MIT Feasibility Projects are designed to help SMEs investigate whether an innovation idea is technically and economically feasible. This can be an important step before investing heavily in product development, market introduction, or follow-up funding.

A feasibility project can help answer key questions:

• Is the technology technically viable?
• Is there a clear market need?
• What are the main development risks?
• What knowledge, partners or resources are needed?

INNOWIDE: International Feasibility Support.

For innovative SMEs with international ambitions, INNOWIDE is another programme worth preparing for. The next INNOWIDE call opens on 1 October 2026 and closes on 1 December 2026.

The programme supports market feasibility projects in countries outside Europe. This can include market research, technical validation, legal or regulatory analysis, and partner exploration needed to understand whether international expansion is realistic.