Competenze e Innovazione Lombardia

What it funds

This measure pays for skills, not for investments, and mistaking it for a grant on machinery or software disqualifies the application before the requirements even come into play: eligible spend is training, specialist mentoring and needs analysis tied to a digital or green transition strategy, as detailed in the call's Annex A. On the digital side the call lists, as examples, artificial intelligence, big data and analytics, cloud, the internet of things, blockchain, process automation, augmented and virtual reality, advanced cybersecurity, next-generation connectivity and customer relationship management systems. Every project must cover at least one of the two areas, digital or green, and may add managerial and cross-cutting actions only where they serve investment in research, innovation, digitalization and sustainability.

Requirements and what is left out

• Anyone without a foothold in Lombardy: it takes an active operating site in the region, as shown in the company register, and micro, small or medium enterprise status under the European definition.
• Anyone planning to apply as a group: applications travel only from single companies, never as partnerships or consortia.
• Anyone filing a course catalog with no strategy: the Project must follow the call's template and hold together company strategy, skills needs, action plan, timeline and financial framework, with its place in the innovation ecosystem and in the regional smart specialization strategy.
• Anyone training people outside the perimeter: participants must hold an active relationship with the company when applying and be assigned to the Lombardy site. Covered are fixed-term and permanent employees, project collaborators without a VAT number, directors, owners and individual shareholders.
• Anyone selling training or consulting: the providers of the call's services and the regionally accredited training bodies cannot receive the grant.
• Anyone operating in the excluded sectors: farming and fishing as a primary or prevalent activity, tobacco, adult retail, lotteries and betting, plus the sectors outside the de minimis regulation's scope.
• Anyone behind on the basic obligations: social security compliance, mandatory workplace injury insurance, no disqualification from contracting with public authorities and no convictions of senior officers that exclude from public tenders.
• Anyone reporting loosely: only spend borne directly by the company counts, invoiced from the date the call sets and settled before reporting. The consulting that writes the Project and the ancillary activities carry their own spending caps, indirect costs are flat rate, and a project of ancillary activities alone is ineligible.
• On combining aid the rule is a ban: the approval decree states the grant cannot be combined with other State aid on the same costs, de minimis included, except for national tax measures that are not aid, and the same spend cannot draw on more than one European fund. The grant also consumes the single undertaking's de minimis allowance.

How to apply

1. Write the Project on the call's template: strategy, needs, action plan with providers and delivery modes, timeline and financial framework.
2. File only through the Bandi e Servizi platform: there is no other channel, and the chronological order of arrival decides the ranking.
3. Pass formal and substantive eligibility and the panel's merit assessment: the award comes by decree of Unioncamere Lombardia, which runs the desk.
4. Deliver the project within its planned duration, request an extension within the cap if needed, and report everything on the platform by the call's deadline.

Beyond the endowment the call accepts overbooked applications on a waiting list, with no financial commitment until assessments free up resources. According to Unioncamere Lombardia's page the desk has been provisionally suspended for exhaustion of resources, overbooking included: before preparing an application it is worth checking there whether the window has reopened.

What this budget builds

I map the skills missing against the transition plan, design the training path on the technologies the call lists, from data to cloud to automation, and mentor decision makers while the plan goes live. I work on the link between training and strategy, for instance tying a customer management system or a process automation to the goal that motivated it: otherwise the course ends and the processes stay as they were. I also leave the people who stay a way to measure whether the new skills are actually used.

This entry is informational and is not advice: I do not handle grant applications, and before committing to a purchase it is worth reading the official source above or talking to whoever files the application.