The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) has launched a new funding program for the digitalization of small and medium-sized enterprises under the name “Digital Jetzt” (Digital Now). We have summarized what you as a company need to know about this in this blog post.

Basically, these are grants for the two investment areas “Digital Technologies” and “Qualification of Employees on Digital Topics.” Since our specialty primarily concerns the use of state-of-the-art digital technologies and the design of new business models using these technologies, we place particular emphasis on this in this blog post.

That the BMWi is tackling the right area with this funding program is shown by a look at the following graphic, which shows the proportion of companies in the DACH region that use or are currently implementing various technologies:

	Proportion of Companies
Security Automation	53.6%
Building new platforms for Sales/Customer Contact, ERP or Internet of Things	53.3%
Intelligent Things (IoT: Industrial & Consumer)	48%
Management of digital identities or multi-factor authentication	47.8%
DevOps incl. DataOps, DevSecOps, BizDevOps etc.	45.5%
Robotic Process Automation	45%
Multi-Channel Architecture	40.5%
Chatbots, Voice Control	39.6%
Virtual & Augmented Reality	31.3%
Mobile Wallet (Payment, Ticketing, Access Control)	29.8%
Migration to S4 HANA	29.6%
Cloud: Serverless Computing	28.6%
Preventive Maintenance	28%

Table: Proportion of companies in the DACH region that use or are currently implementing the following technologies in 2019; Source: statista.de

Basically, the “Digital Jetzt” funding can be applied for by small and medium-sized enterprises from all sectors with between 3 and 499 employees that have a business establishment or branch in Germany. In the BMWi’s application tool, which will be available from September 7, 2020, a digitalization plan describing the entire digitalization project is developed through targeted questioning. This presents the current situation as well as the future target state of digitalization and how new business areas can be developed, business models developed, or market position strengthened through the use of modern technologies.

Investments in digital technologies, particularly software that promotes the internal and external networking of your company, are funded. The BMWi explicitly mentions the following areas as prime examples of eligible investments: data-driven business models, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud applications, and Big Data. As mentioned, we refer to these technologies in this blog post because this is where the main areas of activity of innFactory GmbH are located.

The maximum funding amount is 50,000 euros, with the actual funding amount depending significantly on the size of your company. To limit the economic impact of the Corona pandemic, increased funding rates apply until June 30, 2021. Applications received from July 1, 2021 will be calculated with the originally planned funding rates if approved. So being quick pays off.


	Funding Rates
Company Size	Until June 30, 2021	From July 1, 2021
Up to 50 employees	50%	40%
Up to 250 employees	45%	35%
Up to 499 employees	40%	30%

The starting date for the funding is September 7, 2020. The BMWi states that applications will be processed in the order they are received, i.e., on a “first come first serve” basis. So being quick pays off here too.