Is Cascade Funding Contributing to Closing the Gender Gap in European Innovation?
06 March 2026
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On Sunday, Sploro took part in GLOBALS Tech Festival 2026, joining key voices from the European innovation ecosystem to discuss one of the most decisive growth levers for startups and scaleups: public funding.
In the panel “Fueling Growth with Strategic Grants & Subsidies”, Marta Portalés Oliva (Mobile World Capital Barcelona) and Miguel Garcia (Sploro) explored how companies can strategically leverage EU and national funding instruments to accelerate innovation, scale sustainably and strengthen market positioning.
The message was clear: public funding is not just financial support — it is a strategic asset.
Europe offers a highly sophisticated funding architecture — yet its complexity often discourages startups from fully leveraging it.
Marta Portalés Oliva provided the institutional and EU programme perspective, outlining how companies can better understand and position themselves within:
“Funding is available across Europe, but companies need to align their strategy with the programme’s objectives — not the other way around,” Marta emphasised.
Understanding the logic behind funding calls — rather than chasing money reactively — is what differentiates strategic applicants from unsuccessful ones.
To ground this in reality, the panel referenced concrete EU-funded initiatives such as PQ-NEXT, a Horizon Europe project supporting the development of next-generation quantum technologies, illustrating how structured collaboration and impact-driven design are central to successful funding strategies.
Miguel Garcia complemented the institutional overview with hands-on operational insight from projects Sploro is directly involved in.
Programmes such as:
These initiatives demonstrate how public funding is not abstract policy — it is implemented, managed and operationalised through structured methodologies.
“Public funding works when it is embedded into a company’s strategic roadmap, not treated as occasional income,” Miguel explained.
By sharing these examples, the panel illustrated how cascaded funding in particular has become an agile instrument to accelerate innovation across Europe.
One of the most valuable segments of the panel focused on evaluation criteria — an area where many applications silently fail.
Miguel Garcia shared the founder and operator lens, breaking down what evaluators consistently look for:
“A strong proposal doesn’t just describe a good idea — it demonstrates execution capability, impact potential and strategic alignment,” Miguel explained.
The panel stressed that successful applications are not longer — they are clearer, sharper and strategically constructed.
A recurring concern among startups is the perceived complexity and time burden of EU funding applications.
The discussion reframed this completely. Instead of treating proposals as bureaucratic exercises, Miguel highlighted the importance of structured methodology:
“Many applications fail before submission because the fundamentals weren’t aligned from day one.”
Strategic preparation significantly reduces rewriting cycles, internal friction and wasted weeks.
Winning a grant is only the beginning.
The panel addressed a crucial but often overlooked topic: post-award management.
Companies must be ready to:
Mismanagement at this stage can compromise future funding opportunities.
Public funding is not just about securing capital — it’s about building long-term credibility within the European innovation ecosystem.
The session concluded with a powerful reflection on common — yet avoidable — mistakes:
These errors rarely look dramatic — yet they consistently reduce success probability.
The key takeaway from GLOBALS Tech Festival 2026 was unmistakable:
Startups that integrate public funding into their strategic roadmap outperform those that treat it as opportunistic financing.
Public support can:
When used correctly, grants and subsidies become catalysts for sustainable scaling.
At Sploro, we work with startups, scaleups and innovation-driven organisations to:
Through tools like Kronis, we also simplify access to cascaded funding opportunities across Europe, helping innovators find relevant calls faster and more strategically.
Public funding should not be overwhelming. It should be structured, predictable and growth-oriented.
