Consortia are encouraged to include innovation-related activities in their project, and such activities will be supported by EC funding under the same conditions as R&D activities.
Typical examples of innovation-related costs include:
1. intellectual property protection: protection of the knowledge resulting from the project (including patent searches, filing of patent (or other IPR) applications, etc.);
2. studies on socio-economic aspects: assessment of the expected socio-economic impact of the knowledge and technology generated, as well as analysis of the factors that would influence their exploitation (e.g. standardisation, ethical and regulatory aspects, etc.);
3. activities promoting the exploitation of the results: development of the plan for the use and dissemination of the knowledge produced, feasibility studies for the creation of spin-offs, etc, "take-up" activities to promote the early or broad application of state-of-the-art technologies. Take-up activities include the assessment, trial and validation of promising, but not fully established, technologies and solutions, and easier access to and the transfer of best practices for the early use and exploitation of technologies. In particular, they will be expected to target SMEs.
In addition, innovation costs cover also those activities carried-out by "organisations that possess specific competence in management, dissemination and transfer of knowledge" which are allowed to participate in FP7 projects, even if they don't carry out any R&D activity.
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