On June 19, Friday, at 12.00-01.00 PM, Albert Solino Danışmanlık R&D / Design Center Team Leader Mr. Fırat Özdemir gave us a webinar on “Call for Supporting SMEs for TÜBİTAK Order-Based R&D Projects”  on BEYSAD Zoom. The presentation was attended by 36 people and had a Q&A section.

Main purpose of the program: The program, in order to come up with an innovative product or process, aims to bring together SME-scale companies that can develop such a product/process (Supplier, as named in the call) and the company that can undertake the commercialization stage of this product/process (Client). The companies that will become parties to such a collaboration shall meet the following conditions:

• The Client and the Supplier shall be equity companies based in Turkey,
• The Supplier(s) shall be SME(s),
• All parties involved in the project shall have personnel having a bachelor’s degree on the field involved,
• The project output shall be an innovative product/process created with the R&D project,
• The project output shall have a high potential for commercialization,
• The Client should not have put the output that is the subject of the project on the market previously.

As long as the aforementioned conditions have been met, Arçelik project coordinator as a client may apply to the project with one or more SME-scale suppliers. Arçelik may not play a technical role in the project; its main responsibility is to inspect with TÜBİTAK if the project R&D stages  proceed as planned in the first stage of the evaluation process that is split into 2 stages, and in the commercialization stage that is the 2nd stage, to ensure the commercialization of the product/process and to report the sales values to the organization.

Unlike the current programs, there will be a 24-month commercialization monitoring process after the project has been completed. During this process, the Client will report any commercial gains made in 6-monthly periods. TÜBİTAK stated that they can accept failure at the R&D stage, but will be more strict with the commercialization stage, even though no clear sanctions have been declared yet.