Companies active in the field of innovation in Bulgaria expect the Finance Ministry to support

them this year with some 160 million euro, and in 2010 with some 250 million euro, Spas Spassov, CEO of Saturn Engineering said. Saturn Engineering is one of seven companies awarded at the Fifth National Innovation Forum, which took place on Tuesday. Spassov quoted Deputy Finance Minister Lyubomir Datsov as saying that the Finance Ministry intends to release funding to support innovative companies.

According to Spassov, the government has not allocated money ever before for the companies operating in the field of innovation.

Saturn Engineering received the special award of the jury at the Fifth National Competition for Innovative Enterprise 2008. In 2006, the company won first prize in the Small Company category, and in 2007 second prize in the same competition.

The other six companies which were awarded in the competition for 2008 were Orak Engineering, Pantelei Toshev, Tsentromet, Sparky Eltos, Bianor, and Kate.

According to the innovation index of Bulgarian enterprises in the last two years (2006-2008) the total number of enterprises in Bulgaria which carry out innovation increased by between 3 and 9 percentage points. The information is from a report by the Applied Research and Communications Foundation.

The information about the index shows that a stratum has been formed of about one-third of companies (29-34 per cent) which innovate every year, with 90 per cent of them having a nondecreasing budget for innovations, and half of them increasing it in 2008 from 2007.

Source: BTA