Design-Business Collaboration Scheme (DBCS)

(for details, please refer to our Guide for the Design-Business Collaboration Scheme)

The DBCS aims to promote the interest and investment of small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in relation to utilizing design and transforming design activity into tradable deliverables that manifest exploitation and deployment of intellectual property, which may comprise patent, copyright, trademark or industrial design.

Eligible Applicant

Local design company or academic institution and the SME will be co-applicants in a project application under the DBCS. Either of them, with the consent of the other party, is eligible to lodge an application under the DBCS. The co-applicants should not be related in terms of ownership or management.

Application Information

The applicants are required to provide the project name, project description, project implementation schedule, project budget, with a brief description of the work steps involved and cost breakdown of such steps in the application. The SME is required to give a brief plan on the commercialisation and the generation of intellectual property right of the project outcome in the application. Information of the design company or academic institution and the SME including names, addresses, telephone numbers and names of the contact persons is also required.

The design company or academic institution and SME in an application are required to make presentation(s) of the outcome of their project to the DesignSmart Initiative Assessment Panel and to report the commercialisation status of the project outcome.

Funding Limit for SME

Funding support for each SME is subject to a limit of $100,000, for four projects at most. This limit applies to all SMEs irrespective of the time they participated in DBCS. For instance, if an SME has previously been approved a project with funding support of $30,000, it can still apply for not more than three projects to exhaust the remaining $70,000. However, if it has previously been granted $100,000, it will no longer be eligible to apply as it has already exhausted its funding limit.

Form of Funding Support

Basically the funding support takes the form of a matching grant calculated based on 50% of the approved project cost or HK$100,000, whichever is the lower. However, since each SME is subject to a funding limit of $100,000 for four projects at most, the amount of grant to be approved will depend on the balance in the funding limit of the SME.

The SME should be the sole party to contribute the matching fund in cash, in the form of cheque and bank pay-in slip or other traceable form.

The grant will be disbursed upon the project completion.

Application

Applications for the DBCS are welcomed throughout the year. No application fee will be charged.

Application Procedure

Application should be submitted through our on-line system at this website.

Note:

• Since the design company is the one who actually carries out the work, it will remain to be the fund recipient in an approved application and responsible for providing the audited account upon project completion.

Submit application

Timeline for Submission of Application

Application should as far as possible be submitted before project commencement and in any event no later than one calendar week after project commencement.