EU establishes €100m fast track to innovation

The European Union (EU) has announced a new 100-million-euro (about 135 million U.S. dollars) "Fast Track to Innovation" (FTI) to push great ideas into market, the European Commission said in a statement on Tuesday.
The FTI, under Horizon 2020, the EU's 80 billion euros research and innovation program, aims to fund innovative businesses and organizations to get innovation to market speedily, said the statement.
"It will support small consortia of three to five organisations with strong business participation to give promising ideas the last push before entering the market," the statement said.
According to European Commission, the scheme will be open to applications from January 2015, and it will be open to ideas in any area of technology. But, the application should come from a legal entity established in the EU or in a country associated to Horizon 2020.
Horizon 2020 is the EU's biggest ever research and innovation framework program with a seven-year budget worth nearly 80 billion euros.
In 2015 the total EU research budget, including these items and administrative expenditure, will be around 9.9 billion euros.