New funding available with CSIRO's Kick-Start program
Attention City of Salisbury small and start-up businesses: are you a business needing to develop new ideas or existing products and need help?
CSIRO’s Kick-Start program will offer more research and development funding to small businesses.
Whether you’re in technology, defence, manufacturing, or food production, you may be eligible for the CSIRO’s Kick-Start program that provides research and development (R&D) support to small businesses. The Kick-Start program boosts innovation efforts and helps SMEs overcome common barriers, such as a lack of facilitation support, funding, and specialist knowledge.
The program has been running since 2017 and has already helped 260 small business projects with research and development (R&D) activities, contributing just under $24 million to date.
Previously, only companies with a turnover under $1.5 million were eligible. Now, businesses turning over up to $10 million can also have access to the CSIRO’s research specialisation and capabilities to innovate.
Dr Doug Hilton, the CSIRO’s newly appointed Chief Executive said that the expansion of the program underscored the CSIRO’s commitment to supporting Australian entrepreneurship and innovation.
“CSIRO can absolutely play a role in supporting SMEs to embrace research and in stimulating entrepreneurship among our scientists and others in the community..."
“Expanding the eligibility of the CSIRO Kick-Start program means we can offer more Australian businesses, more Australian innovators, more Australian entrepreneurs' access to the resources, knowledge, and support they need to flourish.”
A Kick-Start success story is EAI’s award winning dental software. Dr Sen Le, EAI’s co-founder, states that it was an honour an exciting development to harness the AI and imaging expertise of CSIRO’s Data61 team and credits the Kick-Start program with helping EAI set a ‘new standard in radiograph analysis.’
Key elements of the program:
- Helping refine the research question
- Connecting businesses with the right CSIRO researchers
- CSIRO matches funding the business puts in for R&D
Examples of your project scope:
- Researching a new idea with commercial potential
- Developing a new product or service to increase your customer base
- Testing a novel product